


To The Wild

by d0nkarnage



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka and Maul hate each other but they both just need to chill, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enemies, Enemies to Friends, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Maul is a crime lord and Ahsoka is his bruiser, all the usual fun stuff, and Maul starts giving a fuck because he has issues, copious headcanons, in which Ahsoka stops giving a fuck for mental health reasons, now featuring, the physical kind!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:34:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 43,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25924465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/d0nkarnage/pseuds/d0nkarnage
Summary: The unfinished padawan, the unwanted apprentice.Once they were both tools for greater powers, but now they are beholden to no one but themselves.[An AU in which Maul saves Ahsoka after Mandalore, and with precious few options left open to them, they dissolve back into the criminal underworld to try to make sense of the universe again.]
Relationships: Darth Maul & Ahsoka Tano
Comments: 67
Kudos: 148





	1. Silent Treatment

**Author's Note:**

> The idea of a crime AU wouldn't leave my head until I started writing it. Everyone has done a "what-if Maul/Ahsoka" fic by now, and they're all incredible. This is my contribution to the trope, and also my first Star Wars fic ever: please, enjoy.

Even three floors above the bar, Ahsoka could still smell the stale, pungent reek of old grease and burning spice, hear the din of drunk, rowdy patrons coming and going, seeking sweet oblivion, and almost taste in the air the absolute lack of _class_ their hideaway of the week exuded.

It wasn’t the best place Maul had chosen for them to lay low so far, but she’d keep her complaints to herself, in light of all that had transpired in the last few months.

Order 66. 

The fall of the Jedi.

Mandalore, left in flames.

Ahsoka leaned onto the window seat, staring out into the blackness of the night. There was a cityscape hidden somewhere in it, but even the light of the stars didn’t penetrate it. A few other windows and lanterns blinked in and out of focus, rainfall refracting any beam that passed through. The whole of the city trying to be as inconspicuous as she was--made sense, it was a seedy locale for criminals, deserters, and drifting, homeless souls with nowhere else to go.

_Guess that includes me now too, doesn’t it._

How long _had_ they been running? Her and Maul. Half a year, maybe? It had seemed so important to keep track of at first, to mark how long they’d managed to stay alive as the galaxy violently remade itself around them. Now, all that felt important anymore was surviving.

 _Sounds like something_ he’d _say._ Ahsoka shuddered, and pressed her forehead into the cold glass. Let herself blame her shiver on the chill.

Maul.

 _Maul_.

That night had replayed itself in her mind so many times now, she was growing tired of it. There was no point in dwelling on what had already happened, on what she couldn’t change. The Jedi tenet of detachment had never been her strong suit in the past, always a hurdle she couldn’t easily vault. Now, it was probably the only thing left keeping her sane. That, and… _him_.

_Of all the sithspawn in the galaxy to have to stick with to stay alive, did it have to be Maul?_

Not that any of them would have been preferable, given some consideration. Ahsoka was almost certain the zabrak would take that as some kind of compliment, if she ever lost her grip on sanity enough to say it to his face. Not out of fear of retaliation, just that once she pissed the Sith off he had a bad habit of either ignoring her or never shutting up. She really didn’t know which was worse. Her own new bad habit was to tune him out, regardless of which reaction she got. Often it made no difference, but she was fairly certain the last time he’d opened his mouth to explain something it had been to tell her about the outer rim planet they were currently hiding on, and now she had no idea where they were.

Really though, like Maul’s moods, it didn’t matter. They weren’t planning to stay long, something she didn’t have to hear from her reluctant companion to guarantee. They never stayed anywhere anymore for very long, if they could help it, though the further they got from properly civilized space, where the Rep--the _Empire_ \--had sway or interest, the longer their stays got. Sometimes by hours, others by days, but never more than a week.

There had been a few close calls with the clones (called Stormtroopers now, apparently, and the wrongness of it turned Ahsoka’s stomach), enough to keep them running, but so far they remained unfound and assumed dead.

The both of them.

Ahsoka was loath to admit that it was entirely thanks to Maul’s connections in the criminal underworld that they’d stayed undetected, stayed _alive_ this long. His network ran far and deep, lackeys all across the known systems keeping their ears open to whispers of news, their eyes open to any signs of suspicion. For reasons beyond credits they were doggedly loyal to Maul, silently carrying out his will with only a wave of his hand. Maybe it was admiration. Maybe it was fear. Maybe it really just was the money.

Whatever it was, it might have impressed her, if she didn’t hate the man so much.

An hour later, the door to the office she was waiting in opened, and Maul stepped in. The way his head snapped up almost imperceptibly at the sight of her showed he was surprised she was in there. Ahsoka didn’t look away from the window, choosing instead to watch his reflection in the glass, her eyes never leaving his. Things went smoothly when they stayed away, and always went downhill fast when they didn’t.

“Lady Tano,” he greeted, the door whooshing softly shut behind him. His expression was unreadable.

“Maul.” She said the word the same way she might have peeled something off the bottom of her boot.

A long silence passed, each regarding the other. Both waited to see if the other would continue, and when neither did, Maul made his way to the desk at the center of the room. The distance between them shrunk, the window Ahsoka was seated at only a few feet behind the half Sith, but even within arm’s reach they were still planets apart.

Suffice to say, their partnership so far was… tolerated.

The temperature dropped when they were anywhere near one another. Conversations were clipped and impersonal, unless Maul was goaded into one of his marathon tauntings. Really, no matter what was being discussed (or snarled) Ahsoka let him do the lion’s share of talking. Any hideout, hotel room, or shuttle they suffered to share saw them performing a needlessly complicated dance of avoiding the other at all costs.

One aspect of slinking back to Maul’s world of power-seeking treachery that Ahsoka had genuinely come to appreciate was the fact it kept him so _busy_. Always there were deals to be made, credits to be collected, black market supplies to procure--seeing to his criminal affairs left him no time to try to pry into her mind, or find that crack in her newly stoic armor he was so certain she had to have. Force knew he’d been trying, every chance he’d had, since the first night they escaped Mandalore together.

 _So much time already_ , she thought. Outside more city lights ignited, flickered, died, and the rain kept up it’s relentless beating rhythm. Unfortunately it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the sounds of the riff-raff downstairs, or the pounding of her own thoughts inside her head. _So much time, and hardly any at all_.

Everything had changed that night, the night they’d frantically thrown themselves into a ship, set the first coordinates they thought wouldn’t get them killed, and raced off to the farthest corner of the galaxy they both knew they might not reach. Ahsoka didn’t want to relive it, so she pushed those memories back down again, just like she did again and again, every day, and finally turned to face Maul.

His feet were propped up on the desk, his fingers steepled, and he was watching her, because of course he was. When was he ever _not_? The moment he’d sensed the change in her, the second he’d realized that a part of her had fundamentally broken that night, Maul hadn’t let up trying to rip her apart to find it. The fixation was disturbing, invasive, and most of all _annoying_. She couldn’t fathom for the life of her why he cared, other than that her pain amused him in some way, or that plying her psyche apart to find out where the young Jedi he’d known had crawled away to die was a pleasant way for him to pass what little free time he had.

She refused to entertain any notion to the contrary.

“What?” she asked, when the seconds dragged out and he still kept boring into her without a word. 

“We’re leaving,” he said, at last. “Tonight.” Maul dropped his legs down to swivel his seat, and started tapping at the keyboard in front of him. The previously black screen above it blinked to life, bathing the both of them in cool, computerized light. Immediately whatever program Maul had last been using loaded on the screen, and he started typing. Over his shoulder she could see star maps, and a path being charted in real time.

Ahsoka waited for him to elaborate. When he didn’t, she wondered if maybe he was starting to learn. Or maybe he’d given up. It wouldn’t surprise her, he dismissed endeavors that didn’t yield favorable results constantly, which she’d decided was very Sith of him. It made his persistent attempts to break down her resolve over the last few months that much more baffling--unless, she considered, her refusing to discuss Mandalore _was_ a favorable result, and that only served to confuse her more.

 _What do you want with me?_ She asked the back of his head, her glare withered, without venom. _It’s been months, and I still don’t get it_. Even in the midst of blocking out Maul during all their time together that was one thing she _had_ been listening for. So far a satisfactory answer hadn’t been forthcoming. It was almost the one thing Maul wouldn’t tell her.

“Where are we going?” she asked, when his hands stilled on the keys. Six words, counting her earlier question and greeting: it was the most she’d said to him in days, she was sure of it.

Maul didn’t turn back around but she could feel that she had his focus. “That depends,” he replied, powering down the screen. They were plunged back into the dim, contemplative shadows Ahsoka had tried, and failed, to meditate in. “As of now, we have two choices.” 

She closed her eyes just as Maul was holding up his fingers to count off their options. She wished she had been able to meditate before he came back from whatever business he’d been tending to on the lower floors; it would have helped to keep her grip on the shields she had to keep throwing up around her mind to stop Maul’s casual prodding, but she’d been nearly incapable of maintaining a meditative state since being forced into close quarters with the man in front of her. She wouldn’t risk vulnerability around him, not now, not ever. Not if she could help it.

“One, we go to Dathomir,” Maul went on. “No doubt Sidious thinks me too cautious or sentimental to ever go back, though I’d prefer it be a last resort. Two, some of my associates have begun colonizing a moon past the outer rim for the purpose of peddling their wares unseen and untraced. So far as the greater galaxy is concerned, it doesn’t exist.”

“Sounds too good to be true,” Ahsoka muttered. _So talkative tonight, aren’t we._

“Entirely.” As closed off as she was to him, she could still feel the mixture of frustration and wariness roiling in the force within him. His force signature brushed against her own now and again, and the sensation was like being dunked head first into dark water. Freezing, choking, unable to breathe or open your eyes, for the relentlessness of it all. When Maul swiveled his chair to gauge her reaction, his eyes latched onto her’s, and Ahsoka had to marvel at how a man whose hate burned so hot could be so damn _cold._

“The only flaw worth concerning ourselves over is the attention consistent commerce of any kind will bring. Even past the outer rim, people are always watching, and word travels quickly. It would only be a matter of time before rumors of a lawless moon entice other syndicates not under my command.” The “yet” was left unsaid. Maul rested his chin on the plateau of his interlaced fingers, eyes still on Ahsoka.

It occurred to her, after a beat too long, that he was expecting some form of response. 

_Ah, so he hasn’t learned, then._ Her uncharacteristic chattiness had given off the impression of communication being on the table again, which it was _not_ , so Ahsoka fell back on the method they’d been using so far to stay civil amidst her apathy.

She shrugged.

 _I don’t care_ , the gesture spoke clearly. And she didn’t. 

Ahsoka didn’t care, not about where they went, what they did, or how unhelpful it was to the half Sith that she gave him almost no input at all. If her unwillingness to contribute at any turn of their unfortunate partnership irked him, he’d never expressed it. If she felt inclined to listen to her instincts, they told her Maul didn’t care that _she_ didn’t care, and that whatever use she served by staying with him on the run was enough to sate his purposes. 

A deeper, more traitorous part of her instincts, the _Jedi_ part, the part she’d brutally buried with all her misplaced _compassion_ and _trust_ , told her Maul tolerated her behavior because on some level he must have understood. 

She didn’t want his understanding. She didn’t want… _any_ of this. Everything Ahsoka longed for, desperately wanted to lock her arms around again, bury her face into and let out a scream she’d been holding in her whole life--was gone, and was never coming back.

So she didn’t care, and it didn’t matter, and Maul accepted her noncommittal gesture with a displeased curl of his lip.

“So be it. To Morix it is, then.”


	2. Sleep, And His Brother Death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first talk of what will be far too many, for either of their liking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Getting back into writing again after so many years is tearing muscles I forgot I had.

_You can tell a lot about someone by how they sleep_.

Someone had told her that once, a long time ago. Who had told her that? Ahsoka couldn’t recall. Like so much else, those memories were faded, and probably better left to fading. Whoever said it didn’t matter, what mattered was the insightful truth of it.

For example, anyone that saw the way the togruta slept would figure out pretty fast that she was roughly two days from dropping dead of exhaustion, because she didn’t _sleep_. Well, not real sleep. Not _restful_ sleep. In any other situation she might have blamed that on Maul, on his presence and the very real danger he posed to anyone that dared leave themselves unguarded around him. Ironically, it was one thing she _couldn’t_ make his fault, no matter how hard she tried.

The fact of the matter was that Maul, so far anyway, hadn’t done anything to put her in harm’s way. Force knew he hadn’t been a gentleman about it and remained as much a caustic bastard as she was positive he’d always been--but he kept his violent tendencies to himself, and his efforts to fly them under the Empire’s radar had probably saved _both_ of their lives more times than she cared to acknowledge.

No, it had nothing to do with Maul. 

It was the dreams.

The _nightmares_.

Since Mandalore, every time she’d tried to close her eyes and rest, tried to snatch just a _few_ hours of respite from this new world that already had her at her breaking point, the Force had assaulted her sleeping mind with visions of all the things she so desperately didn’t want to see, things she’d wasn’t certain were even _real_ , yet tormented her all the same. A rictus of agony, guns blasting into helpless bodies, ships crashing under friendly fire--and, on the worst nights, the nights she’d come hurtling out of sleep with her fingernails clawing at her own face--all vision, swallowed up by a void of black so utterly dark, so _suffocating_ , it choked not just the air from her lungs but the very light from her _eyes_.

Ahsoka stopped sleeping after that, as much as she could get away with. She knew it was killing her little by little, weakening not just her body but her resolve too, and sooner or later the solemn veil of listless apathy she’d been hiding behind would come crumbling down on top of her with no way to halt or recover from it.

And when it did, no doubt _he’d_ be there, waiting to sift through the rubble.

If Ahsoka’s sleep patterns showed the truth of her fear, then Maul’s showed the truth of his lack of it; that was, his lack of fear of _her_. In all their shared spaces the zabrak slept on his back with his head pillowed by an arm, absolutely vulnerable. If it weren’t for everything he’d told her before their duel and the way he went completely _rabid_ with terror after, he could almost trick her into thinking he had no concerns at all. The way he left himself so open, it was obvious he was showing her how little threat she posed to him, and honestly any other time it would have pissed her off to no end to be so _stupidly_ underestimated.

Instead, she was pissed that he was right.

The way she was now, she wasn’t much of a threat to anyone, except herself. Ahsoka knew she was being needlessly self destructive, but all the avenues the Jedi had taught her to calm and center her mind were lost to her… as lost as the Jedi themselves. In their place nothing remained save for weary listlessness, spiralling together with the growing sense of loss that tore her up and left her hollow.

In the dark, on the other side of the ship’s sleeping quarters, Maul stirred. Only the slightest motion of his arm adjusting under his neck alerted Ahsoka, before the darkness split when his eyes opened. She could see only the thinnest slits in the moonlight, meaning he was keeping his gaze on the ceiling. It was a small mercy--Sith eyes were perturbing enough in the daylight, to say nothing of the shadows.

_That’s probably the point._

“It’s three more standard rotations to Morix,” Maul’s smooth voice cut through the gloom. “I know you’re married to a slow death with fatigue, but it’s never too late for an affair.”

Ahsoka couldn’t help herself, his statement was so absurd.

“What?”

“Sleep,” he said. “Go to sleep.”

Her bunk was against the opposite wall, better sheltered by the architecture of the faux shroud canopy above her--Ahsoka was already pressed as far to the wall as she could be yet she found Maul’s words pressed her closer. She pulled her knees tighter to her chest, offering the half Sith the best glower she could muster with what little acidic energy she had. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t looking; with all the tired, hateful looks she’d leveled at him since their _journey_ started she wouldn’t doubt he could feel them by now.

Silence reigned for a bit, giving Ahsoka the false hope Maul had dropped it, until he fully rolled onto his side. This time when their eyes met, it didn’t feel like it had in the office. No more planets here to keep him at bay. The distance between them now was greater than it had been back then, yet the intense scrutiny of Maul’s stare made her feel like they were only inches apart. The man wasn’t even _standing_ , why did it feel like he was towering over her?

“How long?” he asked.

For some reason, she answered him.

“I don’t know.”

“All the more reason to indulge then,” he murmured, rolling back over. “You’re no good to me dead.”

Ahsoka’s nostrils flared, and a sudden anger she’d killed and buried crawled out of her mouth, unbidden.

“No good to _you_? Shove it up what’s left of your ass, Maul, as if I give a _damn_ what I am to you!” 

The moment she spoke she regretted it--no sooner had she said it was Maul flipped back around, his eyes radioactive in the darkness. Like a wave, his anger washed over her, briefly stealing her air, and when it ebbed a second later it was quickly replaced by a rising tide of--

 _Smugness_.

Ahsoka dropped her face into her palm. 

_Shit._

Maul’s laughter broke through her thoughts like a brick through glass, and Force if he didn’t sound as smug as his signature _felt_. 

“Ahh, there it is. It’s about _time_.” Slinking smooth and languid, Maul slid from off his bunk to stalk towards her. Ahsoka wasn’t afraid of him so she didn’t move to flee off the bed, not that it would have made a difference; where on the ship could she go that he couldn’t follow? No, Maul was a threat, but not a threat to her, so she stayed on the bed and settled for glaring at him.

“If I had known that was all it would take, I’d have said so sooner,” he smirked, pressing his forearm into a part of the wall over her. Maul leaned his weight into it, the other hand on his metal hip, regarding Ahsoka more intensely than he had in a while, not since…

 _The shuttle_. 

\--

She’d been so certain he’d take the shuttle and run, take it and leave her to die just like she’d been about to do to him, _would_ do to him, if only she’d gotten there first. He had every reason to, and no reason not to. Ahsoka had meant for Maul to die there--and oh how she’d _wanted_ him to die, after capture became an impossible concept--and then the hangar had started to go all around them, all at once. It was absolute chaos.

It was what she’d told him to make. It was what she’d intended him to die in. It was as deserving an end as any for a man like him, quick and unfortunately painless, a blink-and-you-miss-it death that left one less power-hungry, homicidal sociopath roaming the galaxy. The instant he made it to the shuttle ahead of her and sealed both their fates, guaranteeing her to die in his place in the madness she’d _ordered_ him to create, Ahsoka had enough time to be disgusted with the concept of poetic justice before a massive swell of explosive heat licked her back.

 _This is it_ , she’d consigned. Then a crushing sensation seized her entire chest cavity, wrenched her from danger, and hurled her full force into the ramp of the shuttle.

Maul was there, a step ahead, bathed in the light of the unstoppable destruction raining down around them, eyes alight with panic, jaw set with desperate determination. There was no time for talk. Ahsoka was on her feet and moving, sprinting to the doorway with certain death at her heels. Maul outstretched his hand and this time she took it, grabbing on with all her strength, and Maul answered with his own, hauling her up, up into the cabin, dragging her faster than she could have run on her own.

Into the cockpit. 

Into space. 

Into hiding.

\--  
Ahsoka closed her eyes on the past, opened them on the present.

He’d saved her life. She’d had her suspicions as to why. Now she knew. Really, hadn’t she always known? There was no other feasible option as to why.

“It’s been six months, Maul. Could have saved us both a lot of time telling me your intentions before.”

The zabrak still loomed over her. “Would you have stayed? Would your depression have been enough? Admit it, I’ve kept you breathing by keeping you in the dark.” Maul shifted out of his attempt at an intimidating stance and seated himself rather boldly on the bed. He was so close Ahsoka could have kicked him in the face, which was sounding better and better by the minute.

“Are you implying the only reason I haven’t ditched you is because I’m--I was waiting to see what I _am_ to you?”

“That,” he paused, “or you know you can’t survive without me.”

Ahsoka’s scoff was louder than Maul’s laugh had been. “ _Please_ , I don’t need you.”

“Really?” He laughed again, but it was softer. Meaner. “Delusion doesn’t suit you, Lady Tano.”

It was obvious he was savoring this--for the first time since Manadalore they were actually conversing, and the fact it was a childish argument didn’t put a damper on Maul’s mood in the least. He was getting what he wanted, at last.

“You could have left at any time. Killed me, took the shuttle. Slipped into the crowd on the first planet we docked on. Or the second. Or the third. You could leave now, in fact, if it’s what you desired.”

His eyes, twin suns, seared holes into her. Ahsoka didn’t speak.

“Is it?” he demanded. When she still refused to respond, he continued, leaning in to eat up more of her personal space. It seemed the time of him giving her a wide berth was over. Ahsoka didn’t get a chance to mourn, Maul was already talking again, and so thoroughly cornered she figured there was little else to do but actually listen. Not unless she wanted to escalate their friendly chat into full-blown violence, and as itching as she was to take out some of her starving aggression on something that she could cave in under her fists, this wasn’t the time or place.

If they ever came to blows again, Ahsoka would prefer it be on something less crashable.

“You want to leave,” Maul went on. “But you can’t. Despite your attempts to disprove it, you’re not stupid. You understand the truth of our situation as well as I.” Try as she might to ignore him, Ahsoka just couldn’t block him out for once. She was tired, far too tired. Back in the office her barriers had already been slipping, and after another week in hyperspace without a single night’s rest, she just didn’t have it in her anymore. She couldn’t continue to ignore the sad fact that Maul was, once again, right.

 _Just like Mandalore. He’d been right then, too_.

“As of now, we have no way of telling how many forcewielders remain alive. Other than my former Master, we could very well be some of the last. And if there are others,” he pushed on, when it looked like Ahsoka wanted to interrupt, “if they’re smart, they’ll do exactly what we’re doing. They’ll hide. Sidious has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that he’ll wipe out any threat to his Empire.”

Ahsoka had considered this. She’d considered something else, too.

“You think he knows you’re alive. That’s why you didn’t want to go home, to Dathomir.”

“Dathomir is _not_ my home,” Maul hissed. “It’s simply a place that’s... familiar to me.” The hate in Maul’s eyes flared, and then slowly simmered to an ember as he cast his gaze to some place past Ahsoka, past the wall and all the lay beyond it. There was history in that look, the kind full of phantoms and unfinished stories. Another time, Ahsoka might have prompted for more--there was something about the way his features softened that intrigued her. Like the potential for a fight however, now wasn’t the time.

Maul sighed, and refocused his look on her. It was as intense as ever, though it lacked the fire from a minute ago. “I can feel Sidious, in the Force. Which means he can feel me. I haven’t yet sensed his presence getting close, but I do feel him. It’s like he’s casting a net, dragging it through the combined energies of all lifeforms in his radius.” Maul tapped his temple, just above his left horn. “I feel him here, too, always. That is the nature of the bond between master and apprentice, as I’m sure you well know.”

Ahsoka thought of the unforgiving darkness that stole her sight in her dreams; of fire hotter than any she knew possible licking up her skin in viscous trails, and of the smell of sulfur.

Yes, she knew. She didn’t want to believe, but she knew.

“Truth be told,” Maul forged on, “I think he believes me too weak to threaten him. No, I haven’t escaped. I’m simply not worth chasing.” 

The half Sith finally looked away, stare now fixated on the floor. Chin on his hands, shoulders loosening, it was the most _normal_ Ahsoka had ever seen Maul look. Even caged and unarmed his persona as a living weapon hadn’t faltered, if anything it had added to it. He looked as tired as she felt, if for just a second.

“Then why run? If Sidious knows where you are, and doesn’t care?”

Maul glanced over his shoulder. The look he gave her spoke volumes, and not for the first time in her life Ahsoka felt uncomfortably humbled by what she saw.

This wasn’t about him. That had changed the moment she stepped on Mandalore, and not Master Obi-Wan--Kenobi was his enemy, the greatest conductor of all of Maul’s hate and rage, the catalyst for his evolution into the man he was today; had he come in her place, the battle fought wouldn’t have been a duel of fates or a test of wills. It would have been a slaughter.

But then she’d come instead, and suddenly things were different. 

Ahsoka, the exiled Jedi, and Maul, the abandoned Sith. Had anyone else stood in her place he would have seen only another foe to be cut down, because no one else occupied the unique place Ahsoka was in to be bargained with. Maul had seen himself in her, and with her a whole new path to take, one that could only be walked together.

She still hated him. Refused to see him any differently than he was. She wasn’t a Jedi anymore, the requirement to sympathize was no longer an intrinsic aspect of her moral code.

How infuriating it was that she still did, hatred and all.

“You’re doing this for me,” she said, barely above a whisper. The thought was too disturbing to voice any louder. “You think I’ll help you fight Sidious.”

“Won’t you? If I recall, you were perfectly willing to see his end before our agreement. Or do you still think I seek to replace him?”

Ahsoka studied him through narrowed slits.

“I don’t know what you’re really after, Maul. I’m not going to help you. If it really is just us left then we don’t stand a chance, and we probably never did.”

She could see how she’d aggravated him in the way his shoulders tensed. Honestly, as a former Sith, she thought he ought to feel satisfied--her admission was easily the most hopeless thing she’d ever said. The Sith were supposed to be into the kind of thing, right?

His body relaxed suddenly though, startling Ahsoka enough to blink in surprise. Somehow Maul was more unpredictable when he was calm, so she braced for whatever reaction he might have, prepared for him to finally snap and lunge at her, the thing she’d been waiting for these last long months.

Her reflexive reaction to bring her arms up to defend herself came off excessively ridiculous when Maul’s shoulders started to shake, slowly and then with real force, and a sick weight settled in Ahsoka’s stomach as she lowered her arms.

He was _laughing_ again. 

Not just laughing either, the zabrak was holding his sides, he was laughing so hard. Where his amusement before had been selfish and triumphant, this was--well, it was _broken_. It racked him, wrung him out, and the sound ricocheted against every wall of the cramped bunkroom, echoing back to batter at Ahsoka’s eardrums. The volume wasn’t actually that unbearable--it was the fact it was coming from _Maul_ , after what had to be her fourth rejection of his plans.

_Force, am I watching a Sith Lord have a mental breakdown right now?_

Against her better judgement Ahsoka almost reached out to touch his back, a leftover muscle memory from before all this--thankfully Maul stopped before her hand could betray her like her emotions had. Once more he cast her a glance over his shoulder.

“Oh, Lady Tano,” he sighed, the ghost of a smile still on his lips. “I do believe you are right.” His force signature was full of turmoil when it swept over her’s; another shudder she couldn’t suppress. His face, however, had fallen right back into its customary exterior of placid indifference.

“When you asked me to join you… you already knew it was too late, didn’t you?” Ahsoka asked. Pieces of the puzzle were starting to fall into place. “Even if I had said yes, would it have made any difference, Maul?”

Force save her, she wanted him to say yes. The guilt alone would eat her alive as long as she lived, but to know all of it-- _all of it_ \--could have been prevented with the simple surrender of every gut instinct and moral she’d held dear...

From how long it took him to reply, Ahsoka knew that wasn’t what was coming. The shame of the relief it brought her got to chew her up instead.

“No. No, looking at it in the retrospective, I don’t think it would have. Everything was already happening so fast. Whether it had been you or Kenobi, nothing would have lured Skywalker to me in the end. My Master’s claws were in too deep, I think. And, in the grand scheme of things, perhaps so was I.”

Maul rose to return to his own bed, indicating that their uncharacteristically lengthy verbiage had come to an end--something still nagged at Ahsoka, though.

“Then… why?” she asked again. “Why keep me around? I’ve never even _tried_ to help you, you must have known I wouldn’t go along with your suicide mission from the very beginning. You want me to be of some use to you, you said it yourself. If I won’t, and I _won’t_ , then why not toss me out the airlock now?”

The half Sith sprawled back out on his bed, as open and vulnerable as ever, horned head cradled by his arm. The alien glow of his pupils was gone, and Maul kept his mouth just as shut. Ahsoka’s own methods came back to haunt her, once again reminding her of poetic justice and its inherent irony.

 _Turnabout is fair play, I guess_ , she admitted begrudgingly. _Fine, don’t tell me then. But you’re wrong if you think I want answers more than I want to get away from you_. A little voice reminded her she’d had six months to get away from him and strike out to survive on her own, and hadn’t done a damn thing about it except keep near to the safety of Maul’s shadow and silently wallow in grief. The voice sounded too much like Maul for her liking.

It took about a full minute and Maul’s breathing deepened, slow and easy. Ahsoka watched the rise and fall of his chest from her bed, legs hugged to her core. It was hard for her to comprehend how he went from laughing like a maniac to sleeping like a baby; clearly Maul had… issues.

But he also had a point.

Sleep. She needed to sleep.

 _Three more standard rotations to Morix, huh?_ Ahsoka sighed, ran her hands over her face and scrubbed hard at her eyes until she saw galaxies behind her eyelids. _Stay right there. Give me just a couple of hours of stars, alright?_ She kicked her blanket far enough down her body to cover her feet and tried to settle herself onto the mattress in an imitation of the ritual she’d previously taken so much pleasure in.

The former Padawan was out cold in half the time it took Maul.

 _Little victories, Tano. Little_ _victories_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm split on the next chapter, I've got two scenarios in mind and I can't decide if I want them to start breaking those emotional walls yet with a pickaxe or a wrecking ball, hmm hmm


	3. For Neither Ever, Nor Never

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This new hideout gives Ahsoka some time to reflect.

After Mandalore time had moved in a slipstream. In the wake of Order 66 life was a blur--the Force was in agony, everything out of balance, and the only way to survive was to cut it off like an infected limb.

Separated from the all-encompassing hum of the universe, Ahsoka’s senses had deadened to the feeling of the Force. She numbed every nerve in self-defense until she could convince herself she didn’t feel anything at all, and with those feelings went the urge to reopen all the old pathways her mind had once traveled to her friends.

 _Rex._ Had he made it off the ship? Had he found another way without her? She had to believe he had, Rex had been the most capable soldier she’d had the honor of serving beside. Ahsoka knew if she let her defenses down there was a chance she might find him out there, somewhere, hopefully still alive and no worse for wear. But it was a two-way street, and to call out meant there was always the possibility of someone else listening. 

Ahsoka didn’t know which was worse: getting the wrong answer, or no answer at all.

So time whipped by and Ahsoka let herself get swept up in it. Often she lay awake praying that others had made it out of the end of the war unscathed, their names a mantra she could repeat like a cradlesong to keep their memories alive.

Plo Koon. 

Obi-Wan.

_Anakin._

She wondered, and she couldn’t know. It wasn’t safe to know. All that was safe now was staying out of sight, staying quiet, and keeping everything to do with who she used to be at arm’s length.

Maul saw to that.

In those first few whirlwind weeks on the run he’d procured them new clothes that didn’t hint at a life in temples, and covered as much of their bodies as possible. Massive cloaks, wide and deep enough to disappear his horns, her montrals, their too-loud skin and patterning. Ahsoka had never considered how distinct she truly was in the wider galaxy until showing her face turned into a death wish. It was difficult to adjust to burying herself in billowing cloth and creeping through the shadows at first, and Maul wasn’t above judging her for her shortcomings.

“I wasn’t trained to be a coward,” she’d bit back at him then.

“No, just a _Jedi_ ,” he’d sneered.

Subterfuge wasn’t her way, it was Maul’s, and as Ahsoka grew increasingly withdrawn it became the _only_ way. Their exit from the Outer Rim had shown her heroics had no place in Palpatine’s new galaxy, every bar and town market blasting the announcement of the Jedi as traitors, murderous _insurgents_ that had made an attempt on the noble Chancellor’s life. These newsreels were always accompanied by footage of captured Jedi being executed--many Ahsoka recognized--while the crowds cheered.

_Cheered._

The first time she’d seen one of those broadcasts she’d been sick, puked her guts out on the side of some low-level vendor’s droid stand while he cussed her out in a language she didn’t understand. Maul hadn’t done anything to help her, but he hadn’t said anything to her about it afterwards either, so Ahsoka chose to accept the gesture as Maul’s way of being tactful, and the next time one of the Jedi programs came on she kept her eyes down and walked faster.

The idea of making a stand had crossed her mind before seeing that. A spark of hope had even dared to gleam with thoughts of revolution. Any wistful daydream of taking on the Empire, of fighting back against it, died when she heard all the people she’d once put her life on the line to protect celebrate her friend’s deaths.

“You would have died for any of them,” Maul had said that night, when Ahsoka was walking past him to the fresher. “And they would applaud to see you die like a dog in the street.”

“They… they don’t know,” she’d tried to protest. “This propaganda, it’s poisoned their minds. If they knew the truth--”

“Who will tell them? You?” Maul laughed in her face. “By all means, try. The next time I’d see you would be on the evening news cycle.”

She’d wanted to tell him he didn’t know what he was talking about. She wanted to shout at him that he didn’t know _anything,_ that he was nothing but half a Sith, without love or allegiance or honor, that the innocent civilians of the galaxy were as much pawns as either of them and they _didn’t_ hate the Jedi, they _didn’t_ they _couldn’t_ they _shouldn’t_ and _how could they, how could they turn on us, how could they not see this was all some awful illusion why would they cheer_ and _oh Force will they clap when I die, shot to death by men I used to trust would they even remember who I was--_

Ahsoka didn’t realize her eyes had glazed over until Maul was snapping his fingers in front of her face. She’d blinked away her gut-deep horror and Maul had resumed walking, like the exchange had never happened.

The subject wasn’t broached again.

They kept moving.

Days into weeks into months, on and on, until routine and necessity taught Ahsoka it was easier to shut down than fight back. She learned to mimic Maul’s indifference, until she mastered it and started using it against him. The lesson he’d taught her was well learned: this was not their world anymore. It and all the people in it had no use for her, everyone was potentially an enemy, and if either of them were to die the only one to mark their passing would be the other.

So back into the slipstream they went.

Time bled by, faster and faster, until one morning Ahsoka was standing in a bar on a moon farther out in space than she’d ever been, two drinks in, and surrounded by the only dregs in society that wanted to be found less than she did.

They’d been on Morix for a year now, and she and Maul had settled in nicely.

Previously a lifeless ball of dirt and stone drifting unseen through the reaches of the galaxy, Black Sun and the Pyke Syndicate had worked their magic, transforming desolate wastes into a thriving little moon colony that boasted luxuries unheard of by the miner types that usually occupied rocks like Morix. A breathable atmosphere, running water, and drug dens with pay-per-view Twi’lek pornography were but a few of the amenities advertised by the newest addition to the underworld criminal shipping circuit.

Black Sun and the Pykes had done all the work of getting the town up and running, but Maul had foot half the bill. Being an experienced player in the game of exploit and profit, he’d had the foresight to store a fortune in ill-gotten gains, and every last blood credit went into Morix. His former _business associates_ had happily welcomed him back to the fold after he’d proven himself alive and very much in possession of enough money to show he was as valuable as ever.

Ahsoka figured that’s what they told themselves, at least. They were probably just afraid he’d kill them and seize their operations if they said no. It was a valid fear, Maul would have done it--he’d told her so the first day they’d touched down.

“They’re better established, but my numbers are greater. If they don’t agree to renew our old arrangement, I’ve got twenty other gangs looking to make names for themselves who’d be all too happy to relieve the Black Sun and the Pykes of their… burden.”

“Why pay them at all, if they’re so easy to threaten?”

Getting some rest on the last leg of their journey had given Ahsoka some of her ability to tolerate the zabrak, enough to permit her mood to allow conversation. Maul, never one to miss an opportunity to flaunt his control over others, readily obliged.

“It’s good business. A show of faith, hiding the unspoken promise of consequences. If they take the deal, then my bid was an honest one.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Well,” he’d smirked, pressing the switch to lower the ship’s ramp, “no one can say I didn’t _try_ diplomacy.”

The corner of Ahsoka’s mouth had turned up in the beginning of a grin, and she almost didn’t fight it off before Maul saw. She hated him, hated Maul as much as a former Jedi could, and yet she’d started to laugh, because--because it sounded like something Anakin would have said.

She resolved to put some distance between them again after that. 

Morix wasn’t a big moon by any stretch, and still determined to stay true to her word that she wasn’t going to help him, Ahsoka would find ways far from Maul to keep herself busy as construction on the colony was completed and dirty dealings got underway. Before she completely abandoned ship though, he took her aside a final time.

“Can togruta alter their appearance?” he’d asked, rather suddenly on the landing pad.

“What?”

“Your markings, the coloring of your montrals,” he’d said slowly, as if he were talking to a child. “Can you change any of it?”

“It would have to be dyed, or tattooed over. Why?” Even as she said it, she knew why.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there aren’t many Dathomirii zabraks or teenaged felon togruta that happen to be hiding from the Empire right now. We tend to stand out. I can gamble that my men won’t sell me out, whether it be fear or greed that stays their hand. My being here is enough to give these filth the confidence to show their faces in public, they won’t risk their cut. You, on the other hand,” he’d said, gesturing to her, “are an unknown. You can’t pay them, and you don’t work for them. The only worth you have to people like them is how much the Empire would pay for your head.”

Ahsoka had felt her face markings, trailed her fingertips over the warm white and orange skin, and mulled it over. It was a logical conclusion, one she couldn’t reasonably argue with. Baggy cloaks and ducked heads had worked for quick transactions and short stays, but they were planning to make something a bit more permanent here, and that meant a more permanent disguise.

She didn’t want to. It was wrong, it was _unfair._

 _Right now, the world is wrong and unfair. If you want to live to see it altered, you must first alter yourself._ The voice in her head had sounded like Master Obi-Wan that time. _No state of the self is permanent; sooner or later, we all must submit to change. This is the way of the_ _universe and the nature of the passage of time. The marks on your skin don’t define who you are, that’s for_ you _to decide. They only possess the meaning you ascribe to them._

They were her culture. Her history. Unique to her and her alone. A togruta's birthmarks were sacred--and fatally identifiable. To give in to her sentimentality, her personal attachment... it could be a death sentence. Covering them up would put the old Ahsoka Tano in her grave, as surely as leaving them bare would do the same to the new Ahsoka Tano.

_Great hope comes from small sacrifices._

“Fine,” she’d said eventually. “But tell your cronies they’ll keep their mouths shut about me too, if they know what’s good for them.”

The half-Sith had raised his brow at that, surprised but pleased by her willingness to cooperate. Maul said he’d _see_ _to it, Lady Tano,_ and beckoned her to follow him off the landing dock.

It wouldn’t strike Ahsoka until later how much like her old self she’d acted. 

_Maybe one foot in the grave is enough._

Just so long as the dirt didn't pile any higher.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> press x to diplomacy


	4. If You Keep On Asking Questions, Everything Falls Apart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To survive, you have to adapt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I re-wrote this chapter about a dozen times, please take it away from me

_If the Jedi Masters saw me like this,_ Ahsoka thought, _there’s no doubt; they’d exile me all over again._

The tattoos, expansive and burned deep, took time. 

\--

  
  
No den of vice was complete without an ink-slinger to do the necessary work of keeping underworld scum good and ugly, so naturally it was one of the first side businesses to get up and running after the bar. The trandoshan who ran the place, Jeckt Zoss, had come on a ship with Black Sun, and was very highly recommended. He was also the only game in town.

“Face wipe-and-pipe, huh? Thisss is gonna _hurt._ Sssure you’re up for it?”

“Just get on with it,” she’d said, stone-faced, and hopped up into the chair.

Maul had sat back and watched silently, smirking behind his fist every time Ahsoka yelped when the laser swept over a spot without much meat to protect the bone. Jeckt hissed and clicked his jagged teeth at her each time she twitched, even threatening to tie her down at one point.

“Hold ssstill! You’re ssskewing my lines!”

“Maybe I’d hold still if you stopped _mutilating_ me!” 

“Oh ssshut up, kid. I’m almossst done.”

The thirteen hours in the chair tested Ahsoka’s will; tapping into the Force could have helped her block out the pain, but it felt like cop-out--her history deserved better than to be shaved off, one layer of skin at a time, without so much as a wince. She suffered the pain as penance--an apology for what she had done, and all she was still planning to do.

During one of the rare breaks between colors--in which Jeckt had to re-calibrate the depth his laser tool bit into, and also take a piss--Maul had come closer to inspect the lizard’s handiwork. 

“Most impressive. I see the Black Sun don’t keep him around for nothing.”

“Think he’ll talk?” Ahsoka groaned. Sitting up had been difficult through the sting of her cauterized flesh, but she managed it. Her entire head felt like she’d tried to exfoliate with a lightsaber and finished it off with a salt bath.

“No, he’s part of the Collective, _and_ a professional. I’m certain he’s had more outlaws squirming under his ministrations than he bothers to count.”

At the time Ahsoka hadn’t been very convinced about any gangster’s loyalties, or particularly confident that the entire operation wouldn’t come crashing down on them once Maul’s _associates_ decided they favored instant gratification from the Empire over a year long investment with him. It would take living amongst the scum and villainy for her to find out exactly _how_ loyal they could really be.

  
  


\--

  
  


Because Morix was essentially a glorified shipping depot, it catered primarily to people trying to lay low, drug runners collecting their wares to peddle, and arms manufacturers looking to sell illegal weapons they couldn’t offload anywhere else. The only inhabitants allowed were the employees offered up in service of their respective crime lords, put there to pull in more credits from the moon’s seedy clientele. There was a brothel, but no inn--overnight stays weren’t permitted to anyone that wasn’t working--so housing of any kind was purposely limited. If you owned a storefront, that’s where you lived; if you got a job to pay for your meals while you were waiting for bounty hunters to stop looking for you there was a small set of apartments in town.

All the work housing was kept close to the businesses--it was easier to keep an eye on things that way. The screening process to get a gig and stay longer than a single rotation was _very_ thorough though: neither the Pykes, Black Sun, nor any other gang were taking chances on spies or backstabbers.

Men like Maul, however, didn’t coexist with wayfaring tradesmen or spice addicts. He, along with the other representative crime lords that stayed on Morix to maintain their claim, had their own much more luxurious abodes built further from town, away from the sights and sounds of the degeneracy they profited from.

The half-Sith had commissioned his personal dwelling be built into the very moon itself, nestled deep into the stone underground. Well-founded caution saw it locked tight, sealed off, and only able to be entered by _his_ force signature, and his alone. When the two of them returned there from town she had to stand aside and wait while he opened up the lock.

 _Just another way for him to keep holding power over you, to keep you relying on him. As soon as I’m healed I’m leaving._ Ahsoka didn’t want to go _anywhere_ with Maul after her semi-voluntary torture session, but she didn’t have much choice.

_You can’t trust anyone else on this rock._

Frustration coiled tight in her field. The mechanized lock spun.

 _Trust._ Since when had she started giving the tenuous bond between them a name, other than “barely tolerable”?

He’d saved her life, back on Mandalore. He’d shielded her from the Empire, and brought her to as safe a haven as was feasibly left in the galaxy. Favors--especially ones of that magnitude--never came free. She’d told him she wouldn’t team up with him in his plot against Sidious, told him he’d never have her help in anything he did, and yet when she demanded to know why keeping her alive was so important to him he’d acted as though he never heard the question.

_Sooner or later he’s going to cash in on all these favors. I’m not so sure I can afford it._

With the galaxy in a disarray and the Force in chaos, there wasn’t much left Ahsoka could count on. It was still unclear to her if Maul was on that list, but if not himself she had one thing she _could_ count on: for whatever reason, regardless of the game he was trying to play, for the time being she… _trusted..._ that Maul didn’t want her dead.

 _But why?_ She kept asking herself. The only safe answer she dared contemplate was that Maul assumed himself capable of changing her mind somehow and that all his _generous_ behaviors were a simple switch in tactics. Shows of force hadn’t worked, and neither had his frantic pleas, both of which she’d dismissed as yet another lie from one of the galaxy’s most well known killers and the last ditch effort of a drowning man already up to his eyes in madness. 

But, in the end, Maul had been telling the truth. His warning came too late to save the galaxy, or the citizens of the Republic, or the people of Mandalore, or any of the Jedi.

All except her.

The lock opened.

\--

  
  
  
“Bacta gel will do fine to heal you,” Maul told her when they were inside. It took a few seconds for the system to power the lights on, not that they needed them. They’d been on Morix three rotations, more than enough time to memorize the layout of the small, minimalist lair. When the lights did flicker on they both had to blink to adjust, Maul noticeably longer than her.

“And don’t touch them,” Maul sighed longsufferingly a second before Ahsoka raised a hand to her cheek, as if he’d predicted she would. Like he knew it was the instinctual response to the searing, aching throb in her skin.

Looking over the black lines carved into the natural red of him, she supposed he did.

“Take a seat, Lady Tano. If you plan to pass out, avoid breaking anything. If you plan to be sick, do it before you pass out.” With that he vanished around a corner down the hall, leaving her alone in the entryway.

Going back to her own room to lick her wounds sounded better. Hell, she’d take the bunkroom in the ship they’d flown in on, if her legs would make the journey. A cold sweat had broken out all over her and with it came nausea and a powerful lightheadedness. The last thing she wanted though was to be more of a spectacle for Maul than she already had, especially when her knees threatened to buckle.

  
Ahsoka powered through it, enough to shuffle over and collapse on a disgustingly expensive looking Corellian sofa in-- _what else_ \--red. Throwing up on it had the potential to be very satisfying, a little revenge for the way Maul had smirked at her in Jeckt’s shop, but she wasn’t in the mood to tempt fate. Plus the food she’d had that morning was the first real thing she’d eaten other than rations or protein bars in a long time, and it’d be a pity to waste it.

_I should leave. He’s seen too much; I said I wasn’t going to let myself be vulnerable around him, and here I am waiting for him to fetch me meds, like a child._

A traitorous chorus of thoughts followed very quickly on the heels of the last one, too fast for her to stop or hold off in her state of exhaustion and pain.

 _Darth Maul, former Sith Lord, murderer of Jedi and conqueror of Mandalore, is… fetching me meds._ The concept alone was dizzying, the reality was… nigh incomprehensible. _He killed Master Qui-Gon. He killed Duchess Satine. He’s slaughtered hundreds of innocents, murdered members of my Order, tried again and again to kill Master Obi-Wan,_ **_planned_ ** _to kill Anakin, abandoned his own men… and he’s fetching me meds._

A feeling of realization bubbled up from deep inside, threatening to bend her at the waist and force her to hold in her sides to stay together; it reminded her of Maul on the ship that night, going so still and then bursting abruptly at the seams. His uncharacteristic outburst of emotion was starting to make a dangerous amount of sense.

If smiling didn’t stretch the burn, Ahsoka would have laughed. 

Relief, the kind like lancing a blister. It was relief, of having realized something so obvious, and heaving the burden of misunderstanding off your back. It was clarity, rattling your misconceptions out your mouth. It was the finality of understanding what was going on, after having purposely fled from the truth.

Maul had needed someone else to tell him what he already knew: that nothing he did was going to make a difference, and trying to overthrow Sidious was a fool’s errand. No one else would have ever dared--everyone else served him and knew their place.

The reality of _her_ place was the striking relief that almost sent Ahsoka into an agonizing fit of laughter, and pain be damned she might have gone off the deep end just to howl, because there was no way _Darth Maul_ was keeping her alive because he _needed her._

Not needed her for his plans, not needed her for her skills. 

Just.

Needed.

 _Her_.

She’d tried to ignore the possibility. Oh Force, how she had tried. Shield after mental shield, forcefields innumerable, all to keep _him_ out--guiltlessly, without hesitance--and in doing so she’d cut herself off from what was so blatantly right in front of her own eyes. What had been there, always, regardless of how many times she slapped it away.

A hand, outstretched. 

  
  


\--

  
  


Maul came back from the refresher with a tube of standard medicinal bacta, and something else; a small hand mirror tucked up under his arm.

Ahsoka had reached for it immediately, eager to see what Jeckt Zoss had done to her, but Maul stepped fluidly out of reach.

“Bacta first. It will soften the blow.” 

Frowning despite the sting, Ahsoka held out her open palm, into which Maul dropped the bacta obligingly. 

“That bad?”

“No. The reptile did his work well.” The half-Sith took a seat across from her on another Corellian style chair _also_ in red. “Even so, a fresh tattoo is rarely a pretty sight.”

Ahsoka huffed, popping off the cap with the tip of her thumb. “As if I ever cared about being pretty.” 

It was a lie, if a small one. Romance and intimacy were forbidden to the Jedi, vanity included. Even still, once in a while, she’d looked in the mirror and smiled shyly, pretending to have caught the eye of a stranger. There had been crushes as well, sweet little unrequited things she’d kept secret in her heart. The passing heat of them had been brief reprieves in the cold horror of war, pilot lights to warm her hands over to ward off the chill, but they were never hers to keep.

She spread the gel onto her palms and carefully onto her face, then up onto each montral. The bacta, cool and numbing, worked its way into her abused skin--it stole the burn, slowed the painful throb of blood beneath the surface, and it was so familiar. It smelled like the healing halls in the temple, an image so viscerally real she could have reached out and touched it.

Ahsoka kept rubbing it in, chasing the split second of hurt before it made her insensate so she could blame it for the way her eyes stung. She trained her face into the mask of typical Jedi calm, even as her force signature contracted around her, curling in on her like a wounded animal.

 _No tears._ The girl that would have wept for what she’d lost was gone. Ahsoka had paved over her softness months ago to build a foundation hard enough to hold her weight in a new, unstable world. She couldn’t jeopardize what she’d become for a taste of who she used to be; she’d come too far to go back now. 

These changes could never be undone. To go forward from now on, that was how it would have to be.

Ahsoka recapped and discarded the bacta beside her, signalling to Maul to pass her the mirror.

A hand, outstretched.

Wordlessly he surrendered it, and Ahsoka brought it up to the light, and for the first of many times to come met a stranger in the glass.

“Oh,” she said. It was all she could think to say. 

Ahsoka had entered the trandoshan’s parlor with slate blue stripes on her head-tails, and angular diamonds of white on her forehead and cheekbones. He’d erased, rearranged, and replaced them all--where once blue had been was now a rich wine color, and the stripes, significantly thickened, ate up nearly all the white separating them. On her face the white stripped away as well, reworked with a heavy gold that arched smoothly, no longer jagged or sharp yet contrasting enough to show easily on her orange skin.

It wasn’t until her reflection became unstable that she realized her hands were shaking.

A gloved hand came into view--Maul had stood and approached, and he took the mirror out of her slackened grip just as it came perilously close to dropping. Ahsoka didn’t react, other than to let her shoulders sag, leaving the zabrak’s proximity uncommented upon. She didn’t care that he was there anymore, a new breed of indifference growing inside her from the seeds of truth she’d unearthed earlier.

She would never call Maul a friend, but she no longer felt compelled to call him an enemy. He simply _was._

_So who am I?_

The Force, capricious in its nature, held no answers. So Maul, sensing her turmoil, gave his instead.

“You’ll grow accustomed, with time.” 

His force signature patiently hovered within reach, and while it was still unbearably cold it no longer felt like suffocating. Ahsoka kept her eyes on the floor, but she didn’t retreat. A part of her actually wanted to hear what he had to say--it had taken the destruction of life as she knew it, but she was finally listening.

“Will I?”

“Yes. You’ll have to.”

Without looking up, Ahsoka held open her palm. Maul moved to give her back the mirror, thinking she wanted a second look--and she did take it from him, only to set it aside without relinquishing her grip on his hand. She could feel him stiffen under the leather of his gloves, the stifled tremor in the Force indicative of someone unused to touch; or perhaps just touch without the expectation of violence.

 _Any moment, he’ll retaliate,_ she thought, pulling off his glove. _Be ready for him to swing and grab his saber._

Except Maul didn’t do anything, save stand stock still and study her, his lantern-like eyes watching her every move. He watched Ahsoka tug the black garment fully away, set it aside and then turn his hand around in hers, inspecting it from each angle.

Like the rest of him that remained flesh and blood, Maul’s hand was red with streaks of black. Ahsoka finished examining it, letting it go without preamble, and the half-Sith pulled away slightly too fast. The ex-Jedi took a page from Maul’s book of tact, and said nothing about it.

“Did they hurt?” she asked.

“I don’t remember,” Maul said. “On Dathomir the boys are given their markings as infants.” His bare hand clenched and unclenched, like he was trying to hold onto something only he could see, and that distant quality Ahsoka had seen before on the ship returned to his face. “We grow into them.”

Again, the desire to ask him more surfaced, but Ahsoka felt she’d already taken too many liberties to cross that line tonight--she sensed he’d revealed more than he intended to, with just those three sentences. If all went according to plan, they’d be on Morix for a decent length of time--an opportunity would hopefully present itself for elaboration eventually, and until then she was willing to wait.

Perhaps there were things she might tell him, in the meantime. 

The zabrak collected his glove and the tube of bacta, and made to depart. Ahsoka stayed on the couch, the retrieved mirror now tucked under her arm. Like so many of her other intentions, her plan to leave as soon as she’d healed altered course. The stress of… well, _everything_ was beginning to catch up to her, and she was tired, down to her bones. The aftermath of the war was far away from them; did she really have to keep running?

_I’ll leave in the morning. One more night won’t make a difference._

Her room was in the same direction as Maul’s. Standing more steadily than she sat down an hour ago, Ahsoka rose, and slowly followed him.

It was the only time since running afoul of him that fateful night on Mandalore that she chose to do so of her own free will, and not out of necessity. 

It wouldn't be the last.


	5. Hand in Unlovable Hand

“Another Noonian Fixer, Fulcrum?”

“Sure, Lyn’vida. I could use a refill.”

The bar was dead that early in the rotation, leaving only Ahsoka, the twi’lek bartender Lyn, and a few other assorted gangsters grabbing some chow before their shifts started at the docks or in the shops. 

Ahsoka watched the liquid pour, contemplating it with the laser-focus possessed only by the great meditative masters and the drunk. 

A lifetime without a drop of liquor ever touching her lips, and now she was about to demolish her third Fixer, which had no business in anyone’s liver let alone _her_ liver, but would have been right at home powering a freighter-class starship--it smelled like low-grade fuel, and tasted about as good as it smelled.

It was cheap enough to be free though, and Ahsoka didn’t feel like paying to celebrate.

 _One year on Morix._ She knocked the whole foul beverage back in a gulp, and set the glass on the counter too hard. No one even looked up; that sort of thing was business as usual. _Here’s to a lousy year of hiding like rats, while the Empire dominates the known galaxy completely unhindered. Hope our cowardly asses live to crawl under a rock for another ten months._

An entire year. It was a hard pill to swallow.

So she didn’t. She ordered another Noonian Fixer, let the bartender keep calling her a name that didn’t belong to her, and drank until, when recalling the past, she forgot to remember why she was drinking in the first place.

Nothing was how she ever could have predicted it, not with all the vision in the Force.

_So much for all that soul searching._

\--

Ahsoka stayed that one last night in Maul’s home, and in the morning she put her plan to stand firm away from him into motion.

Things had changed; she didn’t like it. She liked it even less that she’d instigated it. A bridge had been crossed last night--she’d taken Maul’s hand, and not out of desperation. Maul had let her. He’d told her something about himself, a private glimpse into his history, and it hadn’t been something to do with his crimes, his master, or even his revenge.

She told herself she had a moment of weakness; she was tired, hurting, curious about how far the ink went. 

_You’d never seen him without the gloves, and you were mildly delusional. Just because you have something in common with him doesn’t make you friends._

They had more in common than tattoos. The obviousness of that was glaring.

Maul had known immediately. The Sith were infamous mind-readers, unashamed to worm their way into the thoughts of others--when she’d faced him in the throne room Maul had gotten more than enough before she’d thrown up barriers to put two-and-two together. He called them both tools of a greater power, and she’d denied it vehemently despite it being the absolute truth. The Jedi had betrayed her in her hour of greatest need, offered platitudes in place of a true apology, and expected her to walk right back into their open arms, like nothing had happened.

Maybe, if she were meant to be a Jedi, she would have; her emotions would have been set aside and all would have been forgiven.

But she wasn’t a true Jedi.

Much like, as she had begun to suspect on Mandalore, Maul wasn’t a true Sith. 

Fear was a Sith’s ally. It was a means of honing the edge of their hatred, their anger, and all Jedi knew it was fear that Sith needed to master to harness the power of the Dark Side.

There had been no mastery in Maul’s eyes--only cold, frenzied terror. All his composure, all his postering and lecturing… it had all been a facade. Once control was taken away from him and he saw their collective fates waiting, he’d lost it. Ahsoka thought it a trick to disarm her at the time, throw her off her guard, but the way he’d _screamed…_

Two tools, used up and cast aside. 

_That’s us, huh? The unfinished apprentices. Both hunted, both forced to hide, and no one that we can confide in but each other._

Yes, Ahsoka understood. It was precisely why she couldn’t stay.

“I’m going to be living in town from now on,” she said at breakfast. “I’m going to try to get a job in one of the maintenance bays by the shipping docks, and stay in the work housing.”

“Is that so?” 

Dressed down in a tunic with no gloves or robes, sipping tea, Maul hardly looked the part of a merciless killer; in fact it disturbed Ahsoka to see him so… casual. The Jedi honored the concept of privacy, and while Ahsoka had seen her master and her mentors suffer the indignities of war, she didn’t think she’d ever seen them in their bed clothes.

 _This is how he is when he’s alone, in a place he considers as secure as any, I guess._ Again she was struck by the normalcy of him--to look at him you’d see just a man, hardly a hint of the monster underneath. He looked almost _domestic._

There was no domesticating those eyes though, and they watched her as gravely as they always did. Ahsoka sensed she was approaching perilous territory; Maul’s field was brimming with irritation, and she knew from experience how quickly that boiled over into anger, which was what she was hoping to avoid. She still wasn’t scared of him--less than she’d ever been, in fact--but for reasons that propelled her desire to put some distance between them Ahsoka found she didn’t want to upset him.

It seemed… needless. The smell of bacta was still on her skin, the warmth of his hand a fresh memory in her mind. 

“Yes, it is,” she reaffirmed, really putting some conviction into it this time. Maul didn’t look convinced.

“Weren’t you a commander in the war? Did they strip you of your tactical training too, or just the rank?”

Alright, well, now _she_ was irritated. “Save it, I know what you’re going to say.”

“Ah, so now you’re the mind reader? Please Lady Tano, tell us both what we already know.” Maul sat back in his chair, arms crossed, one leg over his knee. “Explain to me like I’m a youngling why putting yourself in a potentially compromising position is the best path forward.”

Ahsoka kept the barriers around her mind tight. To let a single thought slip into Maul’s grasp now would mean failure, and she couldn’t afford that. She understood it was cruel to a degree, but she simply couldn’t let him know the truth, about any of what she felt.

_How would you twist me, if you knew? You destroy, and you manipulate, and you betray. It’s who you are. It’s what you do. And if I told you I don’t hate you as much as I should you’d try to turn it to your advantage, I’m certain of it._

Except she wasn’t. That was why she couldn’t stay.

Hiding something from someone like Maul was difficult. Lying to him was impossible. Ahsoka sighed, and tried to find a grain of truth big enough to disguise her reasoning. Maul needed her, that much was obvious--she still wasn’t certain why, but he did. He’d been showing it without words for months, risking life and limb and blowing through credits just to keep them away from the Empire. He wanted her kept close, whether it was to protect her, or manipulate her into helping him, or both. Maybe he _was_ using her, maybe he wasn’t. The why of it was mattering less and less, because Ahsoka was starting to accept _whatever_ this was as her new normal, and a part of her wasn’t done fighting the galactic shift in her reality.

It was too much. Too much, too fast.

“I…” she started, stopped, then started again. “I need… time, Maul. Since we started running I haven’t had a chance to grieve. I haven’t had time to _process_ anything that’s happened. I need to come to terms with all of this, and I need the room to do it. Alone.”

Maul leaned back in his chair, exhaling through his nose, much harder than Ahsoka liked; but it was a good sign. He didn’t laugh in her face this time. His characteristic smugness was noticeably missing actually, replaced by a steely gaze and a relaxed demeanor the ex-Jedi didn’t buy for a second. She could tell she’d thrown him off balance--her explanation was rooted in emotion, something he’d probably expected from a former Jedi, but the way she’d gone about it left him more curious than incensed.

“As for what you were going to say,” she went on, “you’re going to tell me it’s safer here, that my altered appearance isn’t foolproof or a guarantee of not being recognized, and that what I’m trying to do doesn’t make any logical sense, because my big bleeding Jedi heart is clouding my judgement. Something like that?”

Now it was Maul’s turn to sigh, his sounding much wearier than hers. 

“Yes,” he said, his steely gaze tarnishing, just a bit. “Something like that.”

 _I’m sorry,_ she wanted to tell him. _I’m sorry that I trust you not to kill me, but don’t trust you enough not to corrupt me. I’m sorry that a life amongst criminals and killers is getting too cozy. I’m sorry that, most of all, I’m scared by how easy it would be for me to stay._

Nothing would likely ever be easier than to stay in the gilded cage Maul was offering, yet every aspect rubbed Ahsoka the wrong way. After everything she’d lost: friends, allies, teachers, comrades, and even her home, she needed something to call her own again. Maul, ever heavy handed and callous, was trying to force her into his interpretation of what their lives were going to be from now on. Since Mandalore it had been a journey she’d detached from and given up control of, an emotional self-defense mechanism that had outlived its usefulness in the face of a shot at independence, and finally Ahsoka was prepared and willing to take the wheel again.

_No one holds their power over me anymore. Not the Council, not the Empire, and not you._

“Maul,” Ahsoka said, plaintive but not unkind, “I appreciate you not leaving me to die back on the ship, I do. And I owe you a debt for that, after what I tried to do to you. I owe you a lot, actually. I don’t think I can ever really repay what you’ve done, but I know I can’t do it how you’re asking.”

The zabrak’s relaxed postured tensed. Ahsoka knew right then she’d stepped on a landmine, but it was too late to go back.

“It was my understanding that debtors didn’t get a choice in the currency they paid,” Maul sneered, all vestiges of pleasantries forgotten. He rose suddenly and Ahsoka couldn’t help it--she reflexively pushed away, chair grating on the stone floor. There was no fear in her, only simple combative instinct, and a flash of _something_ passed over Maul’s face. It came and went too fast for Ahsoka to read, and then Maul was moving, striding swiftly with purpose and resounding metal footsteps to the entryway of the base. The Force swelled and crashed around him, anger evident in every line of his body as he clenched his fist, gripping the lock with his mind and sweeping it open with a furious wave of his hand.

“Maul!” Ahsoka said, raising her voice to be heard over the blood pounding in her montrals. She was no stranger to his temper or his rages by now, shields raised before she’d even spoken to guard her against the buffeting waves of Maul’s displeasure. It didn’t make this any easier.

_Damn, this is what I was trying to avoid._

The half-Sith spun on his heel, gesturing to the open doorway. “Go, then.”

Ahsoka didn’t move from the table. She stayed seated, and resolute. She would go, and soon, but she didn’t want to leave things like this. Maul didn’t deserve much in her opinion, but he deserved better than that, if nothing else.

“Maul,” she said again, softer this time. “I told you before I wasn't going to help you. You knew this was coming.” Trying to project light energies in a place so saturated with darkness was a test of Ahsoka’s patience--she let her presence in the living force expand to meet Maul’s and found it ragged. Cold as ever, it lashed out at her contact. She’d grown used to the chill over the past months, and though she shuddered she didn’t flinch. 

Warmth flowed from her without expectation of it being returned, if Maul were even capable of such a thing. Red as a burning sun, eyes like fire, the Sith held no warmth inside him ( _except his hand, warm in mine_ ) only the icy cold of the dark side. Ahsoka knew that. She offered up the tranquility she herself had only just wrested back from the depths of her apathy, in hopes it might at least take some of the edge off him.

Maul had given her his back, and said nothing. The Force quieted, though his signature still writhed around him like a sea of needles, threatening and defensive in equal measure. 

It was the way he’d felt back on Mandalore, Ahsoka realized. Familiar desperation, familiar fury, and, deep beneath it where he thought it out of sight, the smallest pinprick of fear.

Ahsoka stood, walked slowly to Maul. She schooled the itch under her skin telling her to fight or run when his field flared, sharp and indiscriminate, and gave no quarter. Only once they were arms-length apart did she stop.

“Maul,” she said again. _I think I’ve said his name more times today than in all the time we’ve been on the run._ He bristled at the proximity of her voice.

“Lady Tano.” It came out as a growl, low and simmering.

So close to him Ahsoka could _feel_ the festering wound inside him, hastily packed and covered with a bandage of time and silence. Some old memory brought back to the surface, stitches clawed apart by her abrupt decision to leave him, raw and oozing. Whatever had caused it was the same thing that left Maul to sometimes stare past her, distant, fist loosely closing on nothing. Twice now she’d left it alone, too respectful to try to understand what Maul wouldn’t explain--and Ahsoka couldn’t begin to heal what she didn’t understand.

She grabbed the bandage and tore it off with both hands.

“Why are you afraid?”

Maul sucked in a quick breath, and the whole room decompressed.

Silence.

Ahsoka froze. To blink might have shattered the stillness that ruled the room.

Had she gone too far? She felt like she was standing naked in a tundra; cold bit her down to her bones, emanating from Maul so powerfully Ahsoka was surprised what little air did escape her lungs didn’t come out a frigid vapor.

Maul’s tattoos flexed as his muscles stiffened under the skin, fists curling and uncurling. 

“Fear is my ally,” he said at last, still pointedly not looking at the togruta behind him. His smooth voice was harsher in the quiet, and his response painfully mechanical. It didn’t sound like something he’d consciously chosen to say, more like something he was programmed to repeat under duress.

With the silence broken Ahsoka felt emboldened. She stepped in front of Maul knowing he wouldn’t look away with her so near his face, because he’d see it as _weakness_ , and she was right. He held her gaze, looking as defiant as he did cornered.

“No, it’s not,” she told him. “I am.” Just like on the shuttle, Ahsoka bluntly told the zabrak what he needed to hear that he'd never believe coming from himself.

Maul blinked rapidly at that, expression molding from constrained anger to bewilderment. Behind the noxious glow of his eyes something almost cautious peered out, and the freezing bite of the Force lessened.

“Are you?” he asked, skeptical. “An ally would _help_ me.”

“And I will,” Ahsoka promised. “But not how you want. I have to help myself first. It’s like you said before we got here, Maul--I’m no good to you.” She allowed a small smirk to turn up the corners of her mouth. A small jab to reference how Maul had attempted to belittle her before, utterly without malice. It was a poor attempt at banter--that was Master Obi-Wan’s specialty--and yet it still hit its mark.

Some of the ire left the Sith, taking most of the rigid tension from him with it. He didn’t mirror her smirk, but he also no longer looked like someone had pissed in his drink. Maul sighed again, as if he were the most put-upon creature in the galaxy, and re-crossed his arms.

“Should your sanctimonious efforts see you exposed and hunted down, do me the courtesy of not leaving a trail of blood and viscera to my doorstep, would you?”

His front of detached disinterest in her well-being was an easily recognized formality and probably the laziest attempt to save face Ahsoka had ever seen. Like his quip the other day about diplomacy, it reminded her so much of Anakin. The mood couldn’t salvaged, not after her question had triggered such a severe and dramatic reaction, but already she felt herself on more stable ground.

“Oh, you are _so_ sold out,” she smiled. It very nearly touched her eyes.

\--

Every day since Order 66 had come to pass Maul had held all the cards--ships, plans, safehouses, money, drive to stay breathing, _being right_ \--and he’d never let her forget it for a second. What a bizarre turn of events it had to be for him, then, to have chosen a companion he couldn’t bend to his will, and so bizarre it was for Ahsoka that at her behest he’d give up trying. It could all be an act to lower her guard, a ploy with an invisible leash and collar he’d wait to seize and strangle her with when she least expected--

And it wasn’t. She felt it in his field, in his mind, in the living Force. She’d felt it all along, hadn’t she?

_You have but to ask._

He’d looked so tired in that throne room, and so relieved when she’d agreed to give him aid. In that moment, if only for a moment, he would have done anything for her. 

Then she’d refused him, refused to let him die when he begged for it only to save him so she could demand he die in a way more useful to her. And then he’d actually done as she asked, and when his golden opportunity to lay down lethal retribution came, he didn’t take it.

He saved her; and he kept her alive, no matter how much she threw it back in his face, until they were as safe as they were likely ever going to get with the Empire itself after their heads, and _still_ she denied him.

His outburst was logical, and clearly a long time coming.

Antithetical to everything she knew of him, Maul continually showed her mercy. Sith weren’t known to show mercy, allegedly weren’t capable, because mercy too was a weakness, or a lie, or whatever other vile lesson the Sith imparted on their apprentices, and _yet…_ he was merciful. 

And she had been cruel. Permissible as a preemptive defense was how she’d justified it, as well as the fact this was _Darth Maul,_ and she’d have to be _insane_ to not to treat him like the imminent, walking vibroknife in the back he was--except the blow never came, and as time passed it became glaringly evident that it never would. Instead he brought her pain meds and shared words that from his mouth could be construed as _kind_.

Kind words were a favor she could afford to return. All she had to do was figure out which ones she wanted to say.

After she collected her single pack of belongings from her room, Ahsoka found Maul waiting in the lounge. He was dressed for his business dealings, all black with his customary gloves. She noted that his horns were freshly filed as well, and wondered if it was for vanity, intimidation, or both.

He rose to intercept her, and pulled a datapad from his pocket.

“You’ll be wanting this.”

“Aw, a parting gift? You shouldn’t have.”

Maul’s contempt was palpable. “Hardly. It’s your new identity.”

Ahsoka accepted the pad, booting it up to skim through all the data she’d have to memorize. “You know I was planning to fabricate all this anyway, right?”

“Yes, which is why I took the liberty of doing it better.”

“You’re so sweet,” she deadpanned. Reading through what was listed, she saw Maul had crafted a simple but believable persona for her as a professional shipjacker and passable mechanic, with a decently sized record of infractions that stood out without being gratuitous. He’d been listening when she’d told him her initial plans, and remembered.

“Huh, not bad. Wait, you made me twenty-seven?”

“The Empire is looking for a teenager. It’s just another detail to slow their search, should these falsified records ever get passed through the wrong terminal. I should also mention _children_ are barely tolerated in the underworld at the best of times, unless they’re an heir or a slave. Your age will speak to experience and the timeline of your misdeeds. You’ll be less of a target.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I could have really used you back when I got framed for bombing the Temple.” She noticed the space for a name in the data was blank. _At least he didn’t try to pick one for me._

“Ah yes, the best example of the Jedi’s blindness and hypocrisy, second only to their stalwart refusal to acknowledge Sidious sitting right in front of them. I read of it long after it happened. It was the first I ever heard of you.”

Ahsoka tapped the pad to select the line of code she wanted to edit, and carefully typed in **Fulcrum** before finalizing her choice. “I’m sure you were beside yourself at the tragedy.” 

She put the pad away in her pack before Maul could see what she’d typed; the name would mean nothing to him, but if he sensed why she’d settled on it no doubt he’d have more to say about her lack of tactical forethought, regardless of the fact nearly every person who could connect that name to her was dead.

“First good news I’d seen in weeks,” Maul said, not even trying to hide his amusement. “Shame about the Bariss girl. Bigger shame she didn’t kill that Sith pretender Ventress when she had the chance.”

Ahsoka was proud of how little the mention of Bariss’ name hurt her. It did hurt, though. Bariss had cut her deep, and died before she could make amends. There wasn’t much proof she would have tried, but she had expressed remorse for taking lives and blaming Ahsoka; maybe, if they’d had more time, things could have been different. One of a thousand things Ahsoka longed to be different.

“If she’d killed Ventress then I’d probably have been execu--hold on, you know Ventress?”

Maul stiffened. The regret over having spoken was written all over his face, replaced swiftly with a solemn sort of grimace. It was an expression laced with a vulnerability very different from the kind he’d flaunted during their travels through the Outer Rim. It lasted less than a second.

Ahsoka knew she’d pushed Maul pretty far as it was, so she didn’t ask for anything more. It floored her when Maul suddenly volunteered the information, disgust rippling through the Force around him as he spat out the answer.

“We are _kin.”_

“Kin? Is she your--?”

“No,” he cut her off immediately. It was his turn to know what she was about to say, and he wouldn’t permit her to finish speaking that distasteful question into reality. “Kin in only the loosest meaning of the word. We are both of Dathomir. I was a Nightbrother, she a Nightsister.” He said the titles with a mixture of both reverence and acid on his tongue, deeply complex feelings of affection and repulsion twisted up together in them.

_I’m starting to understand why going back there was a last resort, Sidious be damned._

“I see,” Ahsoka said slowly. “If it’s any consolation, the last time I saw her she was a credit-less bounty hunter living in the slums under Coruscant.”

Maul raised a brow. “Someone of her power, reduced to a mere mercenary?” He huffed a laugh at that. “Perhaps I could have one of my men hire her, and lure her here to finish what my Master started.”

Ahsoka shouldered her pack. “I don’t know, I’ve fought the both of you. Ventress was a way tougher opponent.”

“Oh, _please._ Our duel was never a deathmatch, and entirely for your benefit. You’re a skilled warrior Lady Tano, of that I can’t deny, but I forced Sidious to take a knee in one-on-one combat.There is no other I know of who can say the same.” 

The ex-Jedi made for the door, making sure Maul saw her roll her eyes at him as she went.

“And didn’t _I_ throw you out a window, ass first?”

Maul’s field flared with indignation, and the way his shoulders tensed reminded Ahsoka of an animal with its hackles raised.

“I’m beginning to think I should have killed you after all.”

The vault-like door that led out into the pockmarked wastes of Morix was still open--Maul hadn’t sealed it after their “talk”. Ahsoka stared at the disengaged lock, her stomach knotting with the knowledge of not just why it was open, but why it hadn’t been closed.

_Free to go._

It wasn’t that Maul had ever tried to stop her leaving before--he hadn’t needed to. With the state of things the way they were Ahsoka had always known sticking with the Sith was her best bet. Maul knew it, too. 

The lock on the door could only be opened by Maul. Approaching it, she rested her hand on the cool durasteel, feeling out the mechanism with the Force, just to test it. The lock’s resistance was absolute, and Ahsoka was satisfied. Maul could have trapped her, but he hadn’t, and he wouldn’t. Leaving the way out open would be an insignificant gesture coming from anyone else, a simple matter of courtesy commonplace in civilized society, as trivial as table manners or polite smalltalk.

From Maul, it was something akin to a blessing. Probably the only one she’d be getting--he wasn’t precisely the ‘good luck out there’ type, and he’d made his disapproval of her decision unmistakably clear.

_You need to go, now, before his inability to live up to the monster you know he is deep down clouds your judgement more than it already has. All the banter in the universe won’t make him Anakin. Get going._

Ahsoka let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.

“Maul.”

He’d been lingering at the end of the hall, watching her hesitate, waiting to see what she’d do. At the sound of his name his eyes flicked to her’s and Ahsoka thought, not for the first time, that their color was strikingly similar to a biohazard sign. A fitting comparison: if poison were a person, it would be Maul--yet even a poison sometimes did a medicine’s work.

“Lady Tano?” 

Ahsoka touched one of her montrals, remembering the smell of bacta and an attempt at comfort. Maybe there _was_ something she could give Maul, something she should have given him long before this.

She walked the short distance back to where he stood and once more outstretched her hand. He looked from her to it, unsure for a beat. Ahsoka pushed assurance through the Force around them that this was not a farewell and that they weren’t saying goodbye. Maul looked as unconvinced as ever, but Ahsoka knew he wouldn’t turn down what had come to symbolize everything he was trying to achieve. Mouth pressed into a firm line, he extended his own hand, and they clasped each other by the wrist.

A warrior’s handshake--when Maul had seized her in the hangar of the Star Destroyer and pulled her into the shuttle, that was how he’d kept his grip. They’d held on for dear life that way, until the danger eventually passed and they remembered they hated each other. They’d recoiled in mutual distrust and revulsion instantly, ripping apart, and they’d remained that way, for months and months and months, until last night when Ahsoka had, in her fatal sentimentality, taken hold of Maul’s hand a second time.

_Every choice you have made has led you to this moment._

“Thank you,” Ahsoka said, her tone heavy with gratitude. “For all of this. When I’m finished with making my peace, I’ll be back to start repaying my debt. On my terms.”

That strange something flickered within Maul’s eyes again, and vanished just the same.

“Typical Jedi,” he scoffed, squeezing Ahsoka’s wrist the faintest bit tighter. Just a week ago his action would have come off as a threat. Now there was an emotion behind it neither of them would confront. “Always taking the moral high ground when it’s such a long way down.”

She’d denied him everything. He’d denied her next to nothing.

“I’m not going far. It’s a small moon. Don’t act like you aren’t going to keep an eye on me either, I’m no fool. You wouldn’t let me get a scratch.”

They let their hands slip apart. There would be no more ripping and tearing, Ahsoka was sure of it. They would never be friends, never again be enemies, but for the time being… they would be allies.

“Don’t flatter yourself. I’ll be keeping tabs on you to see to it you don’t single-handedly ruin my entire operation when you inevitably blow your cover.”

Ahsoka waved a hand dismissively at him, unfazed. “Sure, sure, right after all your little gangster lackeys finish the coup they’re probably orchestrating as we speak.”

The ease with which they’d fallen into conversing through companionable insults set off a siren in Ahsoka’s mind.

_You’re doing it again. Stop. This isn’t right, and you know it. You’re getting friendly with a murderer steeped in the blood of innocents, of Jedi. Him helping you doesn’t change what he’s done, and there’s no telling how long before he’ll get sick of waiting for you to come around to his ideas for repayment. Go, you’re too comfortable with someone like him as it is._

_Find out who you are now, before he decides for you._

Ahsoka took a substantial step away, back towards the beck and call of the open door.

“I don’t like to owe people, Maul. Try not to do me too many favors while I’m not there to count them, alright?”

“Sith deal in absolutes, Lady Tano, and I make absolutely no promises.”

Ahsoka felt she should say more. Then she thought better of it, and turned and walked out onto the moon’s surface.

The solid metal door shut behind her almost immediately, rolling into place with a muffled metallic clang. She chanced a glance over her shoulder, taking in the barrier between her and where she could feel in the Force Maul was still standing on the other side. 

For the first time since the Republic fell, they were separated. It was an alien feeling, to finally be apart. Ahsoka didn’t like that she didn’t like it, which was further proof why it was necessary. At his side she’d been too close to see--now, without him, there was nothing but to look.

She’d start inward, and go from there.

Ahsoka left the crater, and made for town.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter murdered me and came out so much longer than I intended, BUT I think I've finally laid all the groundwork for the content I set out to write when this idea came to me! no more flashing back between 'one year on morix' and 'one week', we're sticking to the present from here on out (I hope... hhhhhhhhh)
> 
> this chapter is dedicated to my bestie Anna for listening to me explain Maul's whole life story, and helping to re-ignite my desire to write!
> 
> side note: apparently the standard galactic calendar's year is ten months, isn't that weird? I hated even having to type it, but that kind of canon world building stuff I don't like to change. proooobably not ever going to use the canon swear words though they're just,,, way too silly for me,,,


	6. If You Want Blood, We Got It

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *tomska voice* I lied... I lied to you all,,,

It took nearly four months before Ahsoka betrayed every last principle the Jedi Order had tried their hardest to chisel into her soul.

In month one, she got a job tuning up and repairing any ship that graced the docking bays of their degenerate sanctuary, for which she received a truly disgusting weekly sum of untraceable credits. Those credits went into a lock box under her bed, which she stalwartly kept as spartan and sparsely decorated as the rest of her worker residence.

In month two that dedication to the Jedi aversion of materialism went out the window, when she caved and bought new sheets, blankets, and pillows for her bed that bordered on the downright salacious. They were the same shade of burgundy wine as her new tattoos, and the softest thing she’d ever slept upon.

In month three she met a devastatingly witty Duros woman that was dropping off counterfeit ship parts for resale in the Mid Rim. Ahsoka complimented the curves of her ship, and then the Duros complimented the curves of Ahsoka’s biceps. After a bit of flustered, nervous laughter from the Togruta and tentative small-talk, the smuggler asked her if she wanted to see how pretty the ship was on the inside, and Ahsoka _was_ overdue for quitting time, and then they went inside together, and after a few cups of caf, some stories, several bouts of laughter, and one long lingering look into brilliant golden eyes, Ahsoka quietly and guiltlessly renounced her Jedi tenet of celibacy.

In month four, she started drinking. 

\--

Ahsoka had done as she’d said she’d do the day she parted ways with Maul. Like everything else since meeting him she’d gone into the endeavor with only the best intentions, and came out the other side wondering where she went wrong.

For the first few weeks she was unshakable; she did her work in the repair bay like a kind of meditation, pouring herself into the familiar tedium of bolts and wires, lost in the calm of metal on metal and finding an old joy in the small victories of making broken machines sing again.

In her room in the workhouse she practiced her katas, methodically working through the positions, one after another, the way she used to at the temple. Ahsoka was disappointed but unsurprised when the training tried to dredge up memories of her life before the Empire, before the Clone Wars even--all her childhood had been spent like this, days in the warm sun, out in the courtyard of the Temple Gardens, under the watchful eyes of her Jedi mentors, and bathed in the easy trust and love of her fellow younglings. Smiling had been as easy as breathing, then.

Blood trickled past her chin before she realized, in her effort to quell a strangled sound of pain, she’d bitten through her lip.

Ahsoka couldn’t cry. Her heart was too hard for that now, it _had_ to be. But she did her promised mourning all the same.

Morix had no trees or natural flora of any kind, there was nothing for her to build a funeral pyre with, and even if there were she wouldn’t have done it--too much attention to be drawn to someone trying to lay low. She bought incense instead and burned it for days, sitting on the floor with her legs crossed and her eyes shut, remembering every name and face of the dead she could conjure in her mind’s eye, giving each a moment of memoriam, before releasing their memories and all emotions tied to them back into the living Force.

It should have brought her peace. The absence of strong attachment was meant to be tranquil; Ahsoka only felt… empty.

Not like after Order 66, either--that emptiness had been more lie than truth. She’d felt so much in the wake of its execution, so much fear and suffering, so many voices crying out and then suddenly silenced, too much to process without her mind shattering under its weight. So instead of breaking, Ahsoka had simply stepped out from under it and left the universe to take the burden.

The bruises the horror of the Jedi massacre left on her psyche remained however, never healing. Ahsoka had covered them up, pretended they didn’t exist, and when something bumped against them she didn’t flinch. Apathy masqueraded as acceptance when she closed herself off from the Force, but it had only ever been a poor play at it.

She had never been empty. Feigned indifference had been her way of protecting her pitifully fragile heart from breaking more than she could survive. Her hollowness had been a ploy, but now, having fulfilled her Order’s traditions as best she could in her circumstances, she truly was _empty._

Nothing left, not even her sorrow.

  
  


She’d spent the next few weeks trying to find a way back to someone she wasn’t anymore, despite her earlier insistence that it was too dangerous to return. Surely, she thought, in the wreckage of that war-torn child, there might be some parts worth saving.

Between shifts at the docks Ahsoka ran laps around the colony, pushing her body to the breaking point until her legs burned and her lungs threatened to burst. She did drill after drill of training regimens she’d long since learned by heart. At night she broke into Maul’s ship, the one that had brought them to Morix, and in the darkness of the cargo bay she ignited her saber and battled the shadows creeping in at the corners of her vision with increasing ferocity--she thought, if nothing else, she might awaken the fabled anger a Jedi ought never to embrace, cutting through imaginary foes that stirred hatred within her.

Weeks later, all she had to show for it was tired arms and bags under her eyes. Exhausting her stores of energy so that she could rest, cradled in the ebb and flow of the Force, had always worked to realign Ahsoka in the past--purged of physical and mental strength she was free to leave her thoughts and fatigue behind and tune her spirit to the will and guidance of the universe. Mysterious as it was, she trusted in the Force--

But when she reached out she immediately recoiled.

_No._

Even months after the war’s end the Force was calamitous. A skin-deep veneer of placidity hid the worst of it, but peeled back to peer deeper Ahsoka could feel the dark side’s influence raking its claws through the living Force, tearing it apart.

Unable to search for remnants or answers, Ahsoka was left with little recourse. She put the past away again. What good was there in digging it back up? Was she not the amalgamation of her choices, her experiences, just as she was? Who she used to be was purely that: past tense.

 _Maybe that’s the answer you’re looking for,_ she thought. _You can’t bring back the dead, and little ‘Soka is gone. She was a casualty of the war. Stop sifting through her ashes, you’re not going to find anything but dirtied hands._

Forward. She had to go forward. Even without hope, it was the only way to go.

Ahsoka washed her hands of the past, but it didn’t take her long to find a whole new way to get them dirty.

\--

Two weeks and half a day into the fourth month, the day that would mark a year had passed since the fall of the Jedi Order and the Republic alike, Ahsoka walked into the bar a block from Morix’s landing pads and ordered a drink.

Lyn had told her the first day she saw her that her credits were no good in her bar--to which Ahsoka had protested, on the basis that it was a syndicate establishment and giving out anything for free was probably a good way to end up gutted. Lyn’vida had laughed her concern away.

“Crimson Dawn owns this place. I saw you with the boss man a while back, his associates drink free, if they keep it cheap.”

“I don’t work for Maul,” Ahsoka had huffed, taking a seat at the bar anyway. She didn’t want to put her credits into Maul’s pockets but she liked the idea of getting anything else from him for free even less, especially if it came with the assumption of partnership.

“I know, you’re that shipjacker that fixes rustbuckets, down in the back bays. Black Sun’s payroll.” She poured something fizzy and blue into a glass and passed it to Ahsoka, who didn’t take it. “Never said you worked for the boss man, just that ya’ll are associated.” She winked and sauntered off to greet new arrivals, leaving Ahsoka frowning distastefully.

There was no implication in what the Twi'lek had said that Ahsoka cared for. Denying it too vehemently would be suspicious though, so Ahsoka took the drink and kept her mouth shut, and she did that every subsequent day she visited the bar (which started out once a week and became once a day with frightening speed) until Lyn lost interest.

So Ahsoka got her free drinks, cheap as paint thinner and about as appetizing, and she was sitting at the bar in her usual seat one year to the day they arrived, three deep and getting pleasantly sauced, when the door burst open.

Between a childhood full of explosive mortar fire and a brain full of booze, Ahsoka didn’t react. This kind of thing wasn’t new, brawls broke out about a dozen times a day for one stupid drunken reason or another--she knew it wasn’t worth looking up for. If you’d seen one, you’d seen them all. As a hand snatched her by the shoulder and spun her forcibly around, Ahsoka had just enough time to remember the reason Jedi frowned upon drinking was how badly it dulled the senses--slowed your reaction time.

Her whole body was facing a new direction but her eyes hadn’t caught up. Everything felt like slow motion, and her head didn’t line back up with her neck until it was too late to block or dodge the massive fist that slammed squarely into the soft cartilage of her nose.

It broke on impact and Ahsoka was thrown from the bar stool to the floor. Blood and pain flowed in equal measure from the center of her face as she managed to wheeze out a strained “ _fuck”_ before rolling away from whoever had hit her. Sobriety hadn’t caught up with her yet but the Force was there to guide her, telling her where to go to get out of striking distance.

She met one of the support beams in the center of the room, clambered up it with watery eyes. With her feet under her she was free to press her palm to her face to staunch the flow of blood, though it did little good. Ahsoka looked in the direction of where she’d come and saw a hulking Besalisk shaking out the hand he’d cold-cocked her with, blinding rage in his knife-thin eyes.

Ahsoka blinked at him and swallowed the wet mass of blood gathering at the back of her throat. Even more was coming from her crumpled nose, so much so that the haze of inebriation started to clear, pushed out by concern. _Damn, that bastard got me… got me good. Do I even still have a nose?_ One hand wasn’t doing the job, so instead Ahsoka used her entire forearm to wipe her face, obscenely dragging it across and leaving a wet smear of red from wrist to elbow.

The bar had been typically empty that morning, typical ghost crew, which would have meant less of a scene--the ideal outcome of an already less than ideal situation--except that her four-armed mystery assailant had apparently cut a war path to her, and now Lyn’s joint was filling up with on-lookers.

The throbbing pain helped to clear Ahsoka’s mind, and that was when she noted none of the security guys were in the crowd with all the blood-thirsty bystanders, who had taken up chanting _fight, fight, fight_ around them. Behind the bar Lyn had sighed in aggravation and drawled something into a commlink, visibly pissed. The countdown had started for the arrival of goons better suited to their jobs then whoever had been watching the door.

The Besalisk cracked two sets of knuckles with menacing intent, drawing Ahsoka’s attention back to him.

“How was that for a taste, huh?”

Ahsoka blinked at him again.

“Do I know you?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, _skug!_ Nar Shaddaa, two rotations ago? You stole my creds and sabotaged my ship!”

Ahsoka hacked loudly and spit a glob of partially congealed blood onto the floor. Behind the seething intruder Lyn’vida threw up her hands in affront.

“Yeah, sorry, you’ve got the wrong dirtbag. I steal ships, not break them.” Steady on her legs once more Ahsoka walked back to her seat, not sparing their guest a second glance. “Sorry about the floor, Lyn. I can grab a mop if you wa--”

Another fist cut her off, this time whizzing past her face by a hair’s breadth. There was no hesitation from the former Jedi--the veil of drunken stupor had lifted, revealing what Ahsoka had figured out before she’d hit the floor: this guy was an amateur, he was drunker than she’d been, and he’d gotten in a lucky hit. Whoever this mixed-up asshole was, he didn’t stand a chance against her, and maybe if he’d had this misunderstanding before the war, things would have gone a lot better for him.

Ahsoka drove the heel of her palm viciously into the wattle below the man’s mouth at the same time that she slammed her boot down onto his exposed foot.

He _howled,_ and the bar went completely _insane._

Everyone but Ahsoka was screaming--the chant for them to fight grew louder, drowning out the Besalisk’s agonized wail and Lyn’s barked orders for everyone to shut up and clear out, as well as the clatter of chairs and tables being tossed aside for patrons to get a better view.

The roar of the crowd was deafening, the pain in Ahsoka’s face raw, the force of her twin blows where she’d struck something solid reverberating up through her limbs to her core--every sensation washed over her: the heat of friction and pooled blood under her skin, the taste of metal on her teeth when she swiped her tongue across them, and the smell of fear, thick and cloying, so strong it overpowered the iron streaming from her nose. 

And then Ahsoka felt it, something she hadn’t felt in a long time. Something she hadn’t felt since the war.

Clarity.

Sweet, blessed clarity, stark and crisp. 

Chaos unfolded around the ex-Jedi, surrounding her on all sides, but she didn’t see it. She saw men shouting, orders being snapped over a commlink, her enemy crouched before her, poised to strike. She saw a battle to be fought, a war to be won, and in her veins the Force was _singing._

Hoarse from the blow to the throat, the Besalisk’s threat of what he was going to do to Ahsoka once he got his hands on her was lost to the din around them. He lunged, all four limbs extended to seize her and crush the life out of her, and he achieved a grand total of a single step before Ahsoka was upon him.

A year of pent-up aggression, of helplessness and useless anguish, of muted grief, of utter dismay and coiled, animalistic _rage--_ Ahsoka took it all and gave it to him, beat it into him one crushing strike at a time. Everything she’d purged herself of that had wormed its way back into her heart after trying to find peace and failing, everything that had made a home in the hollow void where once a young and naive girl lived.

Master Obi-Wan would have been so disappointed. Anakin would probably have been proud.

It didn’t matter--they were gone. They were both almost certainly dead, just like everyone else who could have judged her hideous betrayal of the Jedi Code.

Mace, Plo Koon, Aayla, Bariss, Yoda.

They were dead, but Ahsoka was alive, alive and wild and new and no longer a child, no, no, no, hadn’t been one for _years;_ she got to live and grow old enough to see the consequences of the Jedi’s failings, and learn, with someone else’s blood hot under her fingernails, what clarity _really_ was.

\--

After it was over, when security finally showed up, they didn’t ask questions. Ahsoka would only learn later it was because Maul had been good to his word about informing his men to keep their mouths shut in matters involving her, and keep a wide berth. A few workers that had lingered after the fight gave their side of the story anyway, saying how the guy had busted in, blackout drunk and started it. She’d also learn that the man who had attacked her was a drug runner for the Pykes; apparently his stolen credits were payment for a recently delivered spice shipment to Nar Shaddaa, which meant whenever he regained consciousness he was going to have a lot more to answer for than causing a scene.

Ahsoka didn’t have any shifts scheduled that day, so she helped Lyn pick up all the knocked over furniture and clean up the mess she’d dripped on the Twi’lek’s floor. As soon as she was finished she left Lyn a tip for the trouble, dropping a handful of creds onto the counter next to her stack empty glasses.

“You want something for that?” Lyn asked, pointing at Ahsoka’s broken nose. “I keep a med kit under the bar for times like these.”

“I’ll be alright,” Ahsoka smiled. “Thanks though. I’ve got something I need to take care of and I want to get it over with before I lose my nerve, you know?”

The middle-aged Twi’lek nodded. 

“Fair enough. Same time tomorrow, Fulcrum?”

Ahsoka made a thoughtful humming noise as she stepped through the broken remains of the door.

“We’ll see. Keep my tab open.”

\--

_I understand who I am now._

_My peace is not tranquility--it never was. From the very start, from the day I became Anakin Skywalker’s padawan, the day the Jedi made me a soldier in place of a peacekeeper, my serenity could only be found in conflict. On the battlefield, I was home._

_I don’t know if… if I can adjust to anything else._

_Maul was right--he and I are two sides of a single coin._

_No matter what we play at being on the surface, underneath it all we’re tools--dangerous, sharpened, ungainly things. Others forged us, chose our shape and purpose and set us to task to see how much work we could give until we broke, and then couldn’t, or wouldn’t, fix us when_ _we inevitably did._

 _Force above, I was only a_ **_child_** _._

_Maul, was it the same for you?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so far this chapter has been my favorite to write, my whole reason for wanting to write it at all was for Ahsoka to get a chance to go feral and at last we're getting there, BRUISER AHSOKA
> 
> this chapter is dedicated to 13_ninjas_secretly_chomping, thank you so much for your kind words, your feedback means more to me than I can ever fully express
> 
> sidenote: idk if anyone cares to do so, but my tumblr is d0nkarnage if ya'll wanna follow or ask questions or give suggestions~


	7. I Am Fear (She Is Hope Personified)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Calm down  
> I promise if you do I'll stick around  
> I know my promises ain't much to you  
> But now  
> You're here  
> I'm safe  
> I'm sound

Maul was not a man of expectations, _per se_. 

He certainly had them, in the sense that he held people to a standard, one which they so often failed to live up to. But gifted with the insight of the Force as he was, Maul never could have predicted the picture Ahsoka Tano painted when she walked into the meeting hall of Crimson Dawn’s headquarters, nose caved in, soaked in blood, and reeking of cheap booze.

“We need to talk,” she said.

The other heads of the Shadow Collective all turned to witness her entrance, and several of their respective bodyguards raised their blasters warily. They all knew who she was--at least, who she was to Maul--so they kept their fingers off their triggers, but it was obvious from their twitching that Ahsoka’s sudden arrival and appearance shocked them. For all they knew she was here to betray him and slaughter the witnesses; they kept glancing from her to Maul, waiting for the order to open fire.

Beholding her from a distance, the former Sith was deeply pleased with the reaction she drew from his men. Every creature in that room ceased to matter now that _she_ was here.

“Leave us.”

Maul stood and dismissed his entire assembly with a wave of his hand, staring them down with an icy intensity that left no room for argument.

Their petty squabbles and business concerns could wait.

Each crime lord bowed and exited the room swiftly, guards in tow. Ahsoka was a breaker in the sea, splitting the tide of their leaving, and each row gave her a wide berth on either side. The rest of the syndicate might as well have not even existed for all the mind she paid them.

Obedient thugs that they were, they vacated the premises in less than a minute: the door slid shut behind them, and now they were only two again, and not once did Ahsoka’s eyes leave Maul.

“Lady Tano.”

They stood at opposite ends of the table, and despite the fact that Ahsoka had come to him with a clear purpose, she seemed to have no intention of coming any closer. Or perhaps she’d lost her nerve? 

Maul longed to crack the barriers protecting her mind apart and cut to the chase of what had finally brought her back to him, split them open and see for himself what she was hiding; after four months and not a single comm, a single _word,_ he was itching with impatience.

_Ah, could I even? She possesses much more fortitude than when first we met._

Maul watched a fresh trickle of blood run down from Ahsoka’s nose, watched her wipe it messily away with the palm of her hand and leave it on her skin, never looking away from him.

“Might I presume, by you standing here, that you found the answers you went looking for?” he asked, slowly closing the distance between them. The closer he came the more he saw: how much of the blood wasn’t Ahsoka’s, how severely the angle of her nose had been altered, how she’d grown at least an inch since last she’d stood before him.

She was so calm. Maul couldn’t sense any shred of doubt in her; she stood tall, stood _proud,_ shoulders squared, exuding strength and staring fearlessly ahead.

 _Force_ , but she reminded him _so much_ of Savage.

“I found answers,” Ahsoka said, when Maul was an arms length away. “Not the ones I expected to find, but answers.”

This close, the smell of alcohol was overpowering, yet the Togruta didn’t seem drunk. Maul considered baiting her to anger by mocking her slovenly decline into drinking--the informants he’d ordered to keep an eye on her since her departure had spared him no details as to what she’d done to keep busy the past four months.

Instead Maul set it aside entirely; this was good, he could _use_ this. Troubled and directionless, Ahsoka had forsaken her precious Jedi _principles_ in favor of the vices she’d always been denied. Doing so had clearly produced results, and any result that kept her by him was a favorable one.

Although, she was getting too self-destructive for his tastes. It was time to put a stop to that.

_You tore yourself down to your foundation to find the secrets buried inside, then let the rubble fall where it will. Now it is my turn to build you back up._

Maul clasped his hands behind his back, tilting his head in interest. “And what answers did you find, Lady Tano?”

Another trickle of blood. Ahsoka let it drip.

“I spent my entire tutelage under Anakin at war; it’s like I was a commander first, and a padawan second. Nearly every defining moment of my growing up was done on a battlefield.”

Maul listened to each word as it left her. He’d waited weeks upon weeks for this, and it was as if every other thought and minor concern he’d been stewing on was forgotten--she had his undivided attention for the first time since Mandalore. He stared at her now much as he had then, trepidation mixing with that disgusting, damnable twinge of _fear._

Ahsoka had asked him why he was afraid, the day she went off on her own. She’d asked him with her eyes many times before that, never putting it into words until his weakness drove him to anger, as it so often did. The girl was wise in ways so _typical_ of Jedi, her connection to the Force strong when it came to matters of emotion, and in that way she was like his brother as well: Savage could always sense Maul’s fear, too.

“I spent months meditating, training, trying to pull some kind of useful truth from the universe,” Ahsoka went on. “I opened myself to the living Force and it’s in absolute chaos. I couldn’t understand what it was trying to tell me… until I was in chaos myself. Then suddenly everything was so clear.”

Maul unclasped his hands, used them to brace himself against the meeting room table as he leaned against it. “The fight in the bar. I received word of it via comm just before you arrived.”

Ahsoka’s fingers twitched. “Yeah. If you could call it a fight.”

Maul couldn’t keep a smirk from forming. “Indeed. From what I was told, you beat your assailant into something entirely unrecognizable. That is not the Jedi way, is it, Lady Tano?”

“I am no Jedi,” Ahsoka replied evenly. 

That sent a ripple through Maul, and made the Force around him thrum in response. 

“No,” he agreed. “No, you most certainly are not.”

Ahsoka was everything he wasn’t in the Force, and her signature burned to brush against--Maul reached out to her regardless. To him, when their auras touched, it felt like a welding torch meeting frozen metal, the hottest of hot clashing against the coldest of cold. Jedi, in drawing their power from the light side of the Force, all tended to possess a warmth around them in Maul’s experience.

Kenobi had been an inextinguishable candle: controlled, composed, constant. Only in the rare moments when Maul had been able to rub salt into Obi-Wan’s wounds of failure had that flame _really_ burned, so hot and so high, like kerosene on the funeral pyre of that miserable Jedi’s _soul._ The memory of Kenobi’s rage and hatred for him were cherished things, and Maul kept them close to his hearts.

He’d never gotten his chance to cross sabers with Ahsoka’s master, this Anakin Skywalker--Sidious’ new _plaything--_ but he imagined for Skywalker to have appealed to his old master in the first place he had to have darkness in him. There was no darkness in the apprentice, only the murkiness of someone embroiled in their anger, and it did nothing to tarnish Ahsoka’s warmth.

The ex-Jedi was tempered, everything in her whittled to an ultra-fine point, the strength of the fire in the Force within her so boiling it could melt durasteel. Maul thought it a terrible shame the Sith didn’t get to her before the Jedi--she’d have made a fine acolyte. Perhaps even an apprentice to have rivaled _him._

Blood was still trickling from Ahsoka’s nose. It was slowing, but enough still gathered under her chin to swell and drip to the floor, where it sunk into the black carpet and vanished. No one would ever know it was there but them.

_What a strange, secret little blood oath to have._

“I’m ready,” Ahsoka said after a time.

Maul’s hearts stuttered in his chest. It was what he’d been waiting to hear, and it still shook him.

“Are you?” he asked, feeling a fool for needing that confirmation. She’d already said so, was fulfilling her sworn promise as they spoke, yet Maul fought to believe it. “You’ve decided?”

“Yes.” For the first time since wiping her face, Ahsoka made a move. She stepped closer, and Maul found himself straightening his posture. The culmination of all his efforts was standing right in front of him, and he wouldn’t greet it so casually.

“I get it now. I wasn’t made for peacetime. Everything I did at the Temple was preparing me for a life I’d have to fight for, we just didn’t know it then.” Her eyes, as fierce and unyielding as they’d been back on Mandalore, bore into Maul. 

He welcomed it--this Ahsoka, the one covered in bruises and blood, calm but brimming with adrenaline, ready to fight--this was the warrior he’d asked to join him. 

“I told myself I wouldn’t--couldn’t--go back to who I was. I tried anyway. I failed. There is no going back, not with the galaxy in disarray. I have to start over, and maybe, when enough time passes, I can find out how to be someone who knows how to live in the world without fighting for it.”

Something in her stance, the openness combined with what she was offering, had Maul seeing ghosts.

_You can... begin again, brother._

Maul stifled the chill that clawed up his spine.

“And, until then?” he asked. 

“Until then,” Ahsoka said, rolling her shoulders, “I’ve got a debt to repay.”

Maul’s twin hearts skipped a beat. And he thought _he_ had a presence. Tano commanded respect, even with a shattered nose and half her face flowering in angry purple blossoms. He understood, when tearing apart the mind of one of the clones under her command, precisely why they chose to take her colors for their armor--what he’d seen there and what he saw now were the same.

Hope.

Maul saw a kind of hope, for _something._ The clones had seen in her hope of victory because they saw her as a leader worthy of following, and it was a well-placed faith. Had Order 66 not been enacted, had Palpatine not been a Sith Lord all the time, the Republic would have won the war. Ahsoka would have been a part of their victory, having led a successful mission to thwart and capture a very real threat to peace and order in the galaxy, returned home a champion, no doubt to be welcomed back into the folds of her Order, still supported by her loyal men.

The hope Maul saw in her was very different from all that. Indeed a fine leader she would make, but Crimson Dawn already had one and the Zabrak wasn’t interested in grooming a successor to his criminal empire just yet. Likewise there was no chance he’d find an apprentice in her; loose as Ahsoka’s grip on her principles had become, if the loss of her entire way of life and every person she’d held love in her heart for hadn’t been enough to turn her, nothing would.

No, the hope that grew in Maul was far more… selfish. It was the same hope that also gave him cause to fear, the reason for which he refused to speak aloud, sometimes even in his own thoughts. Admitting it to himself was almost as impossible as confessing it to another.

Maul so readily wore his hatred and his fury on his sleeves to draw attention to them, and _only_ them, because what was hiding underneath was, to him, so much worse--decades had passed, but the lessons his master had branded him with remained. They were indelible, tattooed deeper than the black on his skin, and despite having learned them as a child they held enough sway over him as a man that he’d called Savage _apprentice_ more than he ever had “brother”.

_He deserved so much more. A mistake I can never correct._

The ex-Sith harbored no illusions as to the kind of man he was; second chances weren’t for men like him, they were _wasted_ on him because he wasted them in turn. Again and again he’d squandered what the universe gave him in pursuit of violent self-serving interests, and unlike the lessons of his master, Maul never learned.

And _still,_ once more, here he was, being given an opportunity. It was baffling--what did the Force want from him? For what purpose did it torment him by sending Ahsoka in Kenobi’s place? What grandeur was there in its design, except to torture him further?

_Did you send her to me so that my missteps could end her life as well, the same as every other ally unfortunate enough to cross my path, and leave me the sole survivor yet again? Even I am not so cruel._

Maul let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding when he saw Ahsoka shift ever so slightly. It would have gone unnoticed by most anyone else; Maul was not so unperceptive. The adrenaline high she’d been riding from her brawl had run its course and was starting to fade--in the Force surrounding Ahsoka Maul could feel her lightheadedness. No doubt any second pain would join it, if it hadn’t already. Still, her mental shields were holding and Maul made no attempt to probe them.

Patience had shown him that simply being present when Ahsoka’s turmoil reared its head was enough to pull her barriers down, and he didn’t mind waiting.

“What are your terms?” he asked, taken by a sense of urgency to end their dealings that had nothing whatsoever to do with how much crusted blood had gathered on Ahsoka’s face.

It was like he said the passcode she was waiting to hear--Ahsoka started talking, much faster than earlier, as if she were trying to get it all out before Maul could interrupt.

“I won’t be your servant, or apprentice, or lackey, nothing like that. Let’s make it clear, I’m agreeing to work _with_ you, not for you, got it? I won’t be your assassin either, or, or your _mercenary.”_ It was obvious saying all of this was wounding her pride, particularly after how vehemently she’d denied him in the past and several insistences that she’d never work with him. 

A mere few months ago seeing her like this would have been deeply satisfying, feeding Maul’s ego with all the sustenance it desired. He might have laughed in her face again, just to see her wallow in shame at having conceded to him. That Maul would have paraded her collapsed fortitude in front of her eyes and humiliated her, just to prove a point. Just to teach the padawan one more lesson.

How much he must have changed in so short a time, that even the _idea_ of doing that to her now made bile rise in the back of his throat.

Ahsoka wasn’t finished. “I’m not your slave, a pet, a _toy,_ none of it. If that’s what you have in mind for me to repay you for saving my life, I’ll take my chances with the Empire. If it’s not, and we really are allies, then--then I’m open to suggestions.”

The trust between them had always been tenebrous at best, like a staircase in the dark: your feet could be solid on the step one minute, but who was to say that a sudden, steep drop wasn’t coming the next? All you could do was to keep walking, and hope.

He’d been walking in the dark since the day he pulled her into the shuttle. Ahsoka, who had been inching a bit at a time since arriving on Morix, was, at long last, taking a leap of faith... and stepping boldly forward.

Maul, not an easily humbled man, felt distinctly so in the company of Ahsoka Tano.

He huffed a soft laugh.

“You really must think me a monster.”

Rising from the table, Maul closed the short distance between them, and took a leap of his own--he took Ahsoka’s hand in his, the one smeared in her blood. Much as he had she froze at the touch, wary of him as ever, and he laughed quietly again, not unkindly.

Turning her hand around in his, mimicking Ahsoka’s former ministrations, he inspected it. The knuckles were swollen and bruised, and several of her fingernails were broken. Maul brought his other hand to his mouth and pulled his glove off with his teeth, letting it drop to the floor.

Held together, side by side, they were red and black in equal measure.

Maul let her go, and couldn’t help but notice that she didn’t snatch her hand away like he had. Ahsoka lingered a second longer, staring down at her stained palm, then slowly curled her battered digits into a fist.

“I am a monster,” Maul said, retrieving his glove. “But I am not _that_ sort of monster. I do not wish to own you, Lady Tano, nor would I relish your indentured torment.”

Ahsoka’s expression was suspicious. She cocked her head at him, eyes narrowed. “Then what _do_ you want?”

Maul almost laughed again. _Oh, more than you could ever possibly know._

“I want… a bodyguard,” he said.

Ahsoka blinked.

“You?” she asked, understandably skeptical. It was a compliment he was certain she didn’t mean to give.

“Yes. Even Sidious, powerful as he is, surrounds himself with protection. Self-preservation is a healthy practice after all, though in his case I’d wager it’s meant more as dissuasion than anything else.” Sith Lords were only ever meant to die at the hands of their apprentices, and his former _master_ had dissolved all that remained of the practices of the Sith. 

Ahsoka took in a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh.

“So… what? I stand at your back during your company get-togethers, look menacing? Flex and crack my knuckles once in a while? I find it hard to accept that anyone here would be stupid enough to try to kill you alone.” 

Maul saw the light going on behind her eyes before she finished her sentence.

“No, not alone. Should my associates see fit to seek new leadership, it will likely be a coordinated effort from every side.” Maul placed a hand over his chest. “I can watch my front well enough on my own. But my back? I don’t have time to look over my shoulder every second of every day.”

Ahsoka visibly mulled it over, looking down and away while she contemplated what the Zabrak had proposed. The conflict in her field sent ripples through the Force surrounding her; Maul found interpreting the reason behind her indecisiveness all too easy. He barely drew on the Force to see it.

“Everything felt _right_ when you were beating that scum to a fine pulp, didn’t it?” he asked, and Maul was so confident he didn’t bother to let her reply. “It did. You said so yourself, nothing made sense until the chaos. You were thrust into a maelstrom of violence as a child, and it was in the midst of that brutality that you formed bonds of brotherhood.”

He had felt the familial ties her clone soldiers had for her during his interrogations. Speaking the name Ahsoka Tano to the one who called himself Jesse was like dropping a stone into a pool of water, the impact dredging up thousands of grains of sand, each a thought saturated with unconditional _love._

“Your men, the Jedi--on the battlefield they were more family than allies. When you fight against an enemy, it brings all those feelings back, does it not?”

Ahsoka looked back up at him, letting their eyes meet. Her gaze was as hard as flint, but her voice came out soft.

“Yes.”

“And it terrifies you, that striking someone down brought those feelings back.”

Ahsoka was silent, and her field coiled tight about her, wrapping her up and keeping Maul out. That was perhaps the most damning indication of the teen’s mental state--she didn’t even realize he’d never been in in the first place.

Maul didn’t need to read her mind to know. 

He knew because it was another sad fact they shared Ahsoka had yet to see.

“Fear not, Lady Tano. You’re stronger than your fear will ever be, and I think you’ll find no lingering guilt in tearing apart whomever is foolish and greedy enough to dethrone a crime lord. If you find releasing your anger through pain gives you more clarity than meditation, by all means, let my sleeping throat be a target for the instruments of your tranquility.”

Ahsoka clenched and unclenched her bloody hand, still weighing the aspects of what Maul was asking her to do for him. Maul stood back and gave her the time to do it.

“Alright,” she said at last. “Bodyguard. I can do that. And once I’ve saved your sorry skin as many times as you saved mine, then that’s it. We’ll be even.”

“The debt repaid,” Maul agreed. Ahsoka nodded and held out her hand for him to shake.

This was it--the point of no return for them both. Something in the Force was whispering, telling Maul that this was unprecedented; the alliance they were forming was going to send them down a path utterly uncharted, one on which they couldn’t retrace their steps. For all his vision, Maul had no idea what was going to happen next--the potential ramifications of their partnership were a complete mystery. 

Change was on their joint horizon; Maul had no way of knowing if it was for the better. He reached out anyway, just another step in the dark, and shook Ahsoka’s hand.

“The pact is set. Welcome to Crimson Dawn, Lady Tano.”

Mirroring his gesture from that morning four months ago, Ahsoka squeezed his hand a little tighter.

“Thanks. By the way, I’m not calling you _boss._ Ever.” Their hands slid apart, but this time they stayed in proximity.

“Good, I _despise_ that title.” Maul gestured to the door. “Come. You are now, for all intents and purposes, the right hand of the Shadow Collective. You’ll be needing a suitable wardrobe, and a bacta tank.”

Ahsoka dabbed gingerly at the mess the center of her face had become and made a muffled hum of agreement.

Watching her press her fingers against the tender mass of congealed blood and inflamed tissue indiscriminately, Maul recalled a distant but vivid, unwelcome memory of exploring a wide expanse of cauterized organs--all that remained of what had once been a whole and singular body--with trembling, unsteady hands, made all the more unstable by the hysteric, hitching cries of the short-lived Lord of the Sith they belonged to.

More welcoming to recall was the pure, distilled serenity he’d found after his mutilation, in the suffering of his enemies and all who dared stand in his way. Their agony was like a siphon for his own, taking it away and leaving him with blessed lucidity long enough to remember, underneath all the pain, who he really was.

If that was what Ahsoka wanted--nay, _needed_ \--who was he to deny her?

 _Rest assured Lady Tano, I promise to provide you with all the_ **_clarity_ ** _your shattered spirit can stomach. I didn’t know how to assuage what plagued Savage. Perhaps this time will be... different._

\--

As they departed, Maul glanced back to reassure himself that Ahsoka was still there, and she was. She was still there, walking just behind his right shoulder. She was there the second time he looked, and the third, too. 

Maul cursed his pitiable weakness each time he turned his head, yet he continued to check.

(No time to look over his shoulder every second of every day, indeed.)

This was all too good to be true, this confusing second chance the universe had given him. When last things had been this good, fate saw fit to rip it all away from him in a instant. 

He had been naive to think the severance of his legs was the worst loss he could live through. Maul’s hubris had been laughable, and so easily punished.

Like all his master’s lessons, Savage’s death was something Maul would never be able to forget, no matter how long this cruel world let him keep on living. It was the rotted, septic hole in his hearts that refused to close. 

It was the wound Tano exposed to air when she asked him why he was afraid. He hadn’t told her then, and Force willing he never would.

_How would your perceptions alter, I wonder, if you knew? Would you offer your Jedi platitudes, your misguided compassion? Would you dare to have empathy for a monster, Lady Tano?_

Ahsoka thought Maul was afraid of something. 

Maul feared nothing and no one, not even his old master. All he felt for Sidious now was hate.

No, Maul’s fear was not _of_ anything. 

He feared _for._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one came out a bit shorter than I originally set out to write, but I think I said everything I was trying to say for the time being
> 
> do people still put song lyrics in summaries or is that considered cringey now
> 
> also, all the chapter titles have been based on song lyrics/titles, and for this chapter the title comes from the song P.O.S. by Faded, which, negating any potential romantic connotations, I thought suited Maul and Ahsoka quite a lot, and I listened to it on repeat while writing this chapter~


	8. Take My Teeth, Tear Through My Cheeks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So maybe I will talk to you  
> The only way I know how to  
> Mhm, I've said my speech  
> Mhm, through sharpened teeth

When Ahsoka arrived on Morix it was a tiny, underdeveloped starport in the farthest region of the galaxy, almost as lifeless as any given asteroid in a belt and about as interesting.

Four months later it had started to resemble actual civilization--more shops sprouted up in the circular marketplace that made a ring around the workhouses, and with them more newcomers to the moon. Slowly but surely Morix began to feel more like a city, and less like a ghost town.

Eight months later, and unless you were looking at the size of it from orbit, you’d never be able to tell the city from any other smuggler’s sanctuary.

Everything about Morix had grown: the buildings, the population, the economy, and, inevitably, its reputation. To keep things as exclusive--and therefore harder to infiltrate--as possible, Morix started operating in secret more than ever before. Entry into the atmosphere was heavily policed by cruisers running illegal cloaking software, and the tech for jamming hailing frequencies from unknown callsigns was upgraded twice a week, sometimes more. Even the code words needed to land without being blown out of the sky were getting harder to obtain without direct employment from the syndicate, meaning independent contractors that didn’t want to be tied down indefinitely to the mob were no longer being permitted.

And Morix wasn’t the only one with a growing reputation--Ahsoka had accrued quite the name for herself in the few short months since she’d set aside most of her pride and morality to start paying back her debt to Maul.

The fight in the bar had only been the beginning. Word spread fast on a small colony, and once folks found out that the young Togruta that had laid out a full-grown Besalisk with just her bare hands had been taken on as the head of Crimson Dawn’s _personal_ bodyguard, well, she was practically a celebrity overnight.

It was the exact outcome Ahsoka had been trying to avoid. Wasn’t the whole point of all this to fly under the radar, lay low, and blend in? Hadn’t she tolerated Maul’s derision of her plan to go off on her own as a massive tactical error, an unnecessary risk, only to have him make her a figurehead? It was Maul himself who had suggested she change her appearance, on the basis that “teenaged felon Togruta” were currently key search terms in every bounty hunter’s database.

_And speaking of bounty hunters…_

In Maul’s lair within the outer craters of Morix, Ahsoka was scanning the side of the holonet usually reserved for the likes of creatures like Cad Bane or Aurra Sing. Since settling into her new life as a traitorous outlaw wanted by the Empire she’d been checking in on the most wanted lists regularly--especially with how popular she was becoming around town--keeping record of how much was being offered for her capture at any given time.

About 5,250,000, currently. Not bad. Not great either, but not bad.

She also checked other names, and in doing so had learned many things she already feared to be true, and one thing she hadn’t dared to hope for.

Many of the Jedi were dead, a terrible reality Ahsoka had already faced and come to terms with as best she could. What ones she hadn’t felt slip away from the Force that first dark day the Republic fell she’d seen listed on holovids, their names and faces touted as war trophies of the Empire. 

Those who weren’t slaughtered in the first year, any who escaped Order 66, began to appear as high paying bounties on the ‘net, and it was through those lists that Ahsoka found out who had survived. The shame in recognizing so few of their names was easily pushed aside with a sad sort of relief; if Ahsoka didn’t know them then they were likely far from the Temple when the purge started, and would never cross her path. It was safer that way, for all of them.

And, when their names sometimes vanished overnight from the bounty registry, it meant the pang of hurt in her heart was easier to forget--less guilt in having no tears to shed.

But one name stood out.

A name that, when Ahsoka read it, hit her like a sub-tram to the chest, and then she really did almost start to cry.

_Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jedi._

_Wanted for High Treason and Crimes Against the Empire._

_Bounty Paid Upon Proof of Death: 10,000,000 credits._

He was alive. 

Master Obi-Wan was _alive._

  
  


\--

Naturally, she didn’t tell Maul.

Their alliance was… delicate, currently, and she had no idea what Maul would do if he found out his most hated enemy was still alive, hiding somewhere in the greater galaxy.

She didn’t want to know what _she’d_ do if Maul tried to pursue him.

(Except she did know what Maul would do, and she knew what she would do, and neither were things she wanted to think about.)

Ahsoka reasoned that Maul would figure it out sooner or later anyway, he had the same access to the holonet she did, and the more she thought about it the more likely it was that he already knew. He commanded a massive underworld enterprise, with near limitless resources for gathering information, and Master Kenobi _was_ probably the only person he wanted dead more than Sidious. Who was to say he hadn’t found out ages ago, and he had been keeping it from _her?_

_Better not to tempt fate._

Knowing Maul, he probably thought she’d try to launch some absurd suicide mission to track him down, or run out on her oath to repay him, or try to recruit Obi-Wan to take down Sidious, or some other thing he’d be the type to think.

It was deeply strange to Ahsoka that she wanted to do… none of those things.

Strange that she didn’t want to seek out one of her old masters, and dearest friends. Strange that she didn’t want to fight the Emperor with him at her side, or fight Sidious to begin with, regardless of who with, because it was _suicide._

Strangest of all that she didn’t want to abandon Maul. It was something the old Ahsoka would have done in a heartbeat, something she’d _tried_ to do back on the Star Destroyer. Something she would have done during their entire stint running together, had an avenue with better prospects presented itself.

But to do it now? That was senseless. It meant betraying Maul and running again, alone this time, unless by some miracle she found Obi-Wan, and what would that accomplish except put them both in more danger than they already were? 

She loved and missed him more than she had the words to describe. There were days she would have given _anything_ to see him again. But she loved him enough to leave him alone. It was the kindest thing she could do for him. 

It was the only thing she could do for him.

Still, from that point on, when she checked for her name in the bounty lists, she checked for Obi-Wan’s too. So long as it remained unclaimed she knew he was alive, and she hoped like nothing else it would stay that way.

  
  
  


\--

  
  
  


Maul, who had been in the ‘fresher, came out into the sitting room only a few minutes into Ahsoka’s morning scrolling of the ‘net, fully dressed with his horns polished and freshly sanded. He’d started dulling them recently--a necessary precaution for their shared training sessions, after one too many gouges and Ahsoka nearly losing an eye.

“Checking your reward, I take it? What is it today?”

“Bit higher than last month,” she said, showing him the screen of her datapad. Maul came over to re-read it, expression mild with disapproval.

“Ugh, such a paltry sum.”

“You think? Some people could live off of that for generations.”

“Irrelevant,” he said, waving his hand dismissively as he turned and crossed the room to the kitchen. “They should be offering ten times as much, it is not as if their precious _Empire_ cannot afford it.” 

“That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” Ahsoka snorted. She tucked the pad into the pocket of her robes and followed Maul, shamelessly taking up space where he was trying to access cabinets.

“I could say something crueler, if you prefer,” he threatened with a loveless smile that was all teeth.

It wasn’t the sort of thing she would have done in the beginning. A year ago staying as far from Maul as she could get was the name of the game, avoiding his voice, his eyes, his presence. Those first few days in the shuttle together had been hell, trapped with no way to escape--tension had never been higher between them, not even during their duel. Ahsoka considered it a miracle they hadn’t ripped each other to pieces the second they’d entered hyperspace. It was divine will alone they’d lasted the night.

“Save it for the training room,” she drawled, unimpressed, letting him alone so she could rifle through the cooler beneath the freezer.

On her home planet, Togruta were hunters of all manner of beasts. Maul made sure to feed her like one--frozen meat was flown in monthly along with all the other provisions for the populace, yet what appeared in their own stock was always fresh. 

She wondered how many credits it was costing him, paying for that kind of luxury.

_Hopefully a ton. Be a nice payback for all the cuts and bruises._

They’d been sparring together every day for over three months now, and while Maul had given her a fair share of angry welts and shallow lacerations, he’d also given her the protein rich diet temple life never had. She’d put on ten pounds of muscle in no time, and had no intention of stopping.

 _A real bruiser ought to look the part, right?_ And, well, she’d die before admitting it, but she really had missed eating like a carnivore.

Ahsoka piled half a dozen choice cuts onto a plate and ate with her bare hands, standing up by the sink, while Maul fixed what she’d come to learn was his customary breakfast of tea and nothing else. They broke their respective fasts standing side-by-side in a silence that Ahsoka wouldn’t exactly call _companionable._ But it was... comfortable.

Somehow, without her noticing, it had slowly become the new normal--the very thing she’d resisted only months before. The corruption she’d feared from Maul had never come; he’d made no attempts to turn her to the dark side or alter her perception of her principles. She kept expecting it, kept waiting for that axe to fall.

So far, no axe.

No betrayal either, or manipulation, or an overstepping of the boundaries she’d written for him in stone. 

_Who’d have thought it, to be happy with disappointment? To be happy at all? To be happy with… this?_ Ahsoka looked around at where she was, and who she was with.

 _Was_ she happy? Was it… _okay_ to be happy? 

The concept of happiness had become a foreign one, an emotion so hard to discern in the fallout of the war she’d given up trying, and as complex as it had been before it was all the more complicated now. She had lived when so many had died, escaped with an _enemy_ and not her _friend_ , and now who knew where Rex was, meanwhile Ahsoka was healthy and whole and standing beside a certifiable _monster_ and--

And she wasn’t _unhappy._

 _How did that old saying go?_ Ahsoka thought, looking sidelong at Maul beside her. For all outward appearances he looked just as lost in thought as she was, tea held with both hands and his eyes half-lidded. It was the calmest she’d ever seen him outside of sleep.

_There is food, there is shelter, there is companionship._

_And everything will be okay, if you just let it._

Ahsoka finished her meal. Maul finished his drink. 

When they were both through with breakfast they placed their dishes in the sink side by side, and when they left the base shortly thereafter to see to syndicate matters in town, they walked there just the same.

Side by side.

  
  


\--

  
  


The gangs had started calling her his shadow.

Not aloud, of course, because every single one of them was absolutely _terrified_ of her; it was what whispered through their minds whenever Maul entered the room and she followed one step behind.

It didn’t matter that she’d been guarding him during his dirty dealings for months now, or that besides standing around looking menacing she hadn’t actually gotten to bloody her knuckles publicly since the fight in the bar.

Privately she’d been bloodying them nearly every rotation, but her gloves hid the evidence of that. Her entire ensemble did a fair job of hiding most all the damage she sustained while fighting with Maul, and as much as Ahsoka’s upbringing rejected garbing herself in all black, she had to admit the Crimson Dawn attire was effective. 

It was a disguise and intimidation, all in one--Ahsoka Tano would never have worn something so indicative of the dark side, wouldn’t have been caught dead in it.

But Fulcrum, former shipjacker and serial criminal turned personal bodyguard of the head of the Shadow Collective? Of course she wore robes to match her _client,_ of course she loomed in the darkness behind his chair at the table and hung his solid gold insignia over her heart, of course she stood at his right hand and promised death to any who dare attack him or step out of line.

If any of them had been planning betrayal before, they certainly weren’t _now._ Ahsoka was as flattered as she was annoyed.

 _Go on, try,_ she beckoned them with her frigid gaze. 

None of them answered her call.

Maul had promised her clarity, and when their combined authority proved too absolute to invite attempts on either of their lives, the half-Sith had no choice but to find other ways to keep his promise.

  
  


\--

“Fight me,” he said one day out of the blue, early in their partnership, after watching Ahsoka pace like a caged animal for some time.

She looked at him incredulously, but she stopped pacing.

“What?”

“Fight me,” he repeated, setting down the tool he’d been using on his leg. The silver prosthetic gleamed dully in the low glow of the base’s overhead lights--Maul saw well in the dark, but not so well he could do detailed maintenance work on his mechanics, and the dimness suited both of their sensitive eyes.

Ahsoka had offered her services on several occasions before, which Maul always adamantly refused. She figured they just weren’t _there_ yet, hadn’t breached whatever wall kept him from accepting the one gesture of help she’d freely given so far; Ahsoka told herself she’d bide her time, sooner or later she’d get a chance to dissect his hardware.

“You want _me_ to fight _you?”_

“You seem surprised I’d ask.”

Ahsoka shrugged. “Didn’t realize you had a death wish.”

Maul laughed, one of his louder ones, the kind Ahsoka recognized as only _slightly_ manic. Meaning his offer was serious, and so was he.

“I thought you wanted me to guard your body, not break it apart.” She approached the couch he’d spread out on to work, hand on her hip. Maul looked up at her with an expression she couldn’t quite fathom; it held that same eerie reverence she’d seen it take on before, like he was seeing someone else standing just past her.

_Who are you looking at, if not me?_

Maul laughed again, this time his softer, crueler one, and rolled his pant legs back down.

“Oh Lady Tano. I’d very much like to see you _try.”_

\--

They went to the room Maul normally reserved for meditating, a floor down from the living area.

It was by far the largest room in the base, longer than wide with the same high ceiling as the first floor, and every inch of the walls were a matching durasteel to the entryway door.

Just as everywhere else in the base, the lights were dim. Ahsoka took one step inside and immediately felt what it was that set that room apart.

The floor was padded, just slightly.

 _Like a training room._ Her gaze shot to Maul, who was busy divesting himself of his robes and starting to stretch.

“You planned this,” she accused, shedding her own outer layers. “Force, I bet it was killing you keeping this a secret. Is this where you were going to bring me, if I agreed to be your apprentice or something?”

“No,” he demurred, honesty plain in the ambient Force surrounding him. “Were you my apprentice, I would have taken you to Malachor, and choked you with the ashes of a thousand long dead force-users, as my master once did for me.”

Ahsoka stood there, balking at what he’d told her. Maul didn’t seem to notice.

“This room I originally intended only for myself,” he went on. “That you might one day join me in it was never a foregone conclusion.”

The ex-Jedi scoffed, though the venom she’d prepared to spit had dried up. What Maul had said about Malachor unsettled her in a way nothing else he’d told her up to that point had.

“And here I thought you could see the future.”

“I thought my vision was flawed?” Maul taunted, his smile smug and knife-sharp. It was a low blow, lower than Ahsoka thought Maul would stoop to this late in the game--her threat of breaking him seemed to have hit a nerve.

_That’s fine, I can hit a few more. He’s the one that asked for this._

Ahsoka’s exterior was calm; her field, conversely, was a miasma of simmering anger she wasn’t afraid to let Maul feel. She kicked aside her discarded robes and fell into a stance in a fluid, full-body motion.

“Rules of engagement?” she asked, and if her tone was haughty then she blamed it on the half-Sith for egging her on.

“Hand-to-hand only, no sabers, no Force,” he offered, taking his own position. Ahsoka acquiesced with an impatient nod, and their lightsabers joined the piles of robes.

Only a few minutes ago Ahsoka had felt like she was humoring Maul and his pointless request, but as adrenaline flooded through her and her muscles started to twitch in anticipation of action, she understood why he’d asked her to fight him.

_Peace of mind. Tranquility. My promised “clarity”._

As of yet, Maul’s authority remained unchallenged, and without a vehicle for her aggression Ahsoka had slowly grown more and more discontent. She realized she’d been bleeding agitation without bothering to stop it, doing it for _days_ even, too tied up in her own inner conflicts to notice. 

Maul noticed though, because of course he did. Proximity was already sinking in its roots of familiarity, and with their new tentative decision to work _with_ each other instead of _against_ each other, it seemed the former Sith didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize Ahsoka’s trust in him. 

She had to remind herself he’d been doing exactly that since Mandalore, and that unless she gave him cause to stop it was disturbingly possible he might do it for as long as they both lived, for however long it took for her to finally trust him back.

 _Do I?_ She thought. _I left to solidify my sense of self, away from his influence, because I trusted him only to keep me breathing. I didn’t trust him to not try to corrupt me._ Maul delivered on the former and disappointed on the latter, and if Ahsoka was alive and her corruption was her own, then what else did Maul have to prove?

_You left, too, because of how easy it was to stay. That fear, at least, is valid._

Because it _was_ easy. It was confusing, morally repugnant at times, and more often than not threatened to overwhelm Ahsoka with guilt for wanting to give in to it when it wasn’t the right thing to do, and then giving in anyway.

She hated Maul, and she didn’t. He was a monster, but he wasn’t.

She left. He let her go.

She came back. He welcomed her.

She wanted to hurt something. He gave her permission.

Ahsoka shifted her weight onto the balls of her feet.

Maul lifted a hand and crooked his fingers at her in invitation. 

She didn’t need to be told twice.

They both blinked, and it began: two steps each to close the distance and they were meeting in the middle. Their first and last duel, already a year in the past, paled in comparison to the way they danced here and now. The space between them was the eye of a hurricane and their blows were the fury surrounding it--whirling, twisting, a maelstrom of near misses and devastating strikes.

It was constant, with no time to think. The Force forbidden, Ahsoka relied only on instinct. Maul was relentless and terrifyingly precise, attacking with purpose and rarely leaving himself open, forcing her onto the defensive in seconds. There was no room in her mind for distractions; to lose focus was to lose the battle. 

_Deflection, redirection, no hesitation. Maintain control. Shift, block, strike._

His elbow, her chest. Her palm, his chin.

A metal heel, a flesh and bone forearm.

Orange knuckles, a black and red lip.

Maul’s horns missed impaling her eye by a centimeter, but Ahsoka’s kneecap found its mark in his gut. Hot blood poured from the gash he’d carved into her brow, down over the white marks she’d turned gold--a tribute, to the girl dead and buried who would never have pushed the advantage of an opponent knocked breathless, to pulverize his ribcage again and again in a brutal staccato rhythm.

It was purifying, the thrill of their combat. The brawl in the bar didn’t come close. A one-sided beatdown could never compare to the euphoria of true combat, and as Maul twisted and reversed their positions, driving her down onto the floor with his shoulder and slamming her skull so hard it _bounced_ , Ahsoka swore she felt, for one perfect second, enlightenment was more than a myth.

Later, when she regained consciousness, they went to the ‘fresher together and took turns applying bacta patches to their bruises. Ahsoka didn’t apologize for breaking three of Maul’s ribs, nor did he apologize for almost blinding her and splitting her face open.

Instead, she wrapped his chest for him, and Maul didn’t resist. Ahsoka afforded him the same courtesy when he pressed a bacta patch to her brow. They didn’t thank each other either; like apologies it wasn’t expected, and it wasn’t needed.

“Your fighting style, what is it?” she asked instead.

“Teräs Käsi,” he answered. A pause, then, “Do you want to learn?”

“Yes,” she said, and she meant it. “But not as your student.” Maul’s face, more black than red with his fresh bruises, frowned in confusion.

“Then what _should_ I teach you as?”

Their fight was done--the Force was no longer off limits. Ahsoka reached out with it, searched for the raw and festering wound inside Maul she’d exposed to the light months ago... and smoothed a hand over it.

“Teach me like I’m the person you see when you look past me,” she told him.

Maul didn’t recoil bodily at her request, but something deep behind his eyes changed, the most minute shift possible; another day Ahsoka would have almost certainly missed it. She saw it clearly that day because Maul had given her back her clarity, and she wondered if he’d stopped to consider the possibility of his own undoing because of it.

 _He wants to shoulder the burden of_ **_my_ ** _pain? Fine by me. That’s a game two can play, and you’ve just given me a score to settle._

She was so busy taking in the way Maul silently struggled to reply, Ahsoka forgot to be ashamed of whose suffering she was trying to ease. This trepidation was in stark contrast to what she’d seen of him on Mandalore--what she’d seen then was explosive, volatile with his horror and rage, and so pitiably _desperate;_ he’d _wanted_ Ahsoka to see.

This was different. This was locked tight, so tight only slivers of what lie beneath could be felt or seen.

Ahsoka knew next to nothing about Maul--the _real_ Maul--and if he wanted his trust reciprocated, that was going to have to change.

After what felt a lifetime Maul finally spoke, and some of the walls between them, at long last, started to crumble.

“I won’t teach you like I taught Savage,” he told her, and it was the very first time Ahsoka ever heard remorse in his voice. “But I can teach you like I _should_ have taught him. Of that, Lady Tano, you have my word.”

The name stirred a distant memory, someone her masters had spoken of long ago in passing but she had never seen herself.

“Savage Opress,” she said, the pieces falling into place. “Your brother.”

And Maul smiled a thin, bitter smile. It was solemn, broken, and impossibly fond.

“Yes. My brother.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is by far my most self-indulgent chapter thus far, and it went a bit off the rails for me a times, but regardless of where this fic goes from here I'm proud of myself for getting back into writing and creating my self-indulgent schlock.
> 
> (Not pictured: Maul's lowkey 'oh shit' moment when he realizes he knocked Ahsoka the fuck out)
> 
> also I am THIS CLOSE to the scene I had in mind when I set out to write this AU and the anticipation is physically killing me lmaoooo


	9. You Must Do Unto The Others (As The Others Unto You)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A thousand nights have passed  
> Change doesn't happen overnight  
> Not visible at first (no)  
> It's important to hold on, hold on

It was late in the rotation when Maul got the comm.

[ _My Lord, your presence is requested at the landing pad._ ]

Both his hands were busy, one gripping the edge of the table, the other locked in a deathgrip with Tano’s. Their knuckles were bone white, their jaws set in matching grimaces, their elbows pressing into the metal so hard it was beginning to dent--they’d been at it for nearly half an hour so far after Ahsoka had challenged him to see who had the superior arm strength, and it was likely the table would give out before they did. 

“You gonna get that?” Ahsoka asked with a tight smile, a bead of sweat running down the side of her face. “Could be important.” 

Maul’s body was immutable; he wasn’t about to engage a single unnecessary muscle to answer a call when he needed all of them to keep Ahsoka in check. A quick flick of the Force depressed the receiver button for him, crackling open his side of the connection.

“Situation, Fife?”

The Pyke’s voice was raspy when he spoke, like he’d been shouting. [ _One of the new spice runners is refusing to hand over his credits payment._ ]

Ahsoka tightened her grip and smirked sadistically at Maul’s strained grunt, though his arm didn’t budge.

“Aww, you guys can’t handle one little drug mule?” she taunted in the direction of the commlink affixed to Maul’s left wrist. “Does Krim’s majordomo need a lesson in _negotiation?”_

A brief static burst from the other end--Fife had either covered his mouth or his comm, likely to hide whatever he’d muttered, knowing both his job and his life were very much on the line.

[ _We considered simply killing him and seizing his ship with everything inside, but with the heightened security measures required to do business under the Empire’s nose we’re short of contracted couriers._ ] A beat of silence. [ _He has sworn he intends to hand over the credits, but only after he ‘meets the man in charge’. We informed him Marg Krim does not leave Oba Diah to waste time on underlings. Then he said that’s not who he came to see._ ]

“Neither do I waste time on underlings,” Maul growled. “Get to the point.”

[ _He is asking for you, my Lord. By name. He claims to know you, says that you’ve had dealings before._ ]

Flaring anger gave the Zabrak an edge his tempered calm hadn’t, and Ahsoka’s arm submitted an inch. Now it was her turn to grunt and strain. She puffed a few quick breaths and glared at the commlink, blaming Fife’s interruption for stoking the fire of Maul’s latent rage.

“Who _hasn’t_ Maul done business with? This guy sounds like he’s never worked with _anyone_ before, least of all us. No one with that much audacity would have lived to tell the tale.”

Maul almost pointed out she’d unintentionally complimented him again, but that would no doubt incense her, and Maul wasn’t partial to getting his arm ripped off.

“Give me a name,” the Zabrak hissed. His whole right side felt like it was on fire and his shoulder was screaming in its socket, so he used that pain and turned it into strength to gain another inch over his bodyguard. Ahsoka fumed from the other side of the table; she all but snarled when she bared her teeth at him, and he felt her drawing from her own reserves in the Force. Her bicep bulged, and his forearm bent back two inches, losing him all the ground he’d won. 

Fife’s voice came over the comm again, much more insistent this time and nearly drowned out by the sound of several others arguing in the background, slowly growing louder.

[ _He identified himself as Hondo Ohnaka, my Lord._ ]

Maul froze. Across from him Ahsoka did the same. Their eyes snapped up to meet, blue into gold, and the taut clutch of Ahsoka’s hand lost all its aggression, dissolving suddenly into a desperate sort of grapple. Maul was curious of the recognition he saw looking back at him in Tano’s gaze--it seemed Ohnaka was one of their “mutual friends”.

 _Not entirely surprising. Kenobi was his ally, in some capacity._ A sense of vague unease was building in Ahsoka; Maul felt it pushing and pulling like a low tide in the Force, brushing against his with every other beat of her heart; tethered as they were--both figuratively and literally--Maul’s pulse quickened in response, a four-part beating of his hearts.

“There are none under our command with that name,” he said smoothly, using his favored silky tone that best hid his mounting displeasure. It was a tactic all his men were familiar with, which was why a dark satisfaction unfurled in Maul when Fife started talking faster.

[ _No, not that name, of course not my Lord. The employee ID chip he used was registered under the name Dars Saddok._ ]

“Stolen?” 

[ _His corneal scans match the ones in the database from when the order was dropped off, so unless he stole a set of eyes the ID is his._ ]

Maul let Fife’s message roll around inside his mind for a beat, turning the words this way and that before an answer aligned on his tongue in a way he liked.

“Tell him to wait in his ship. If he does not obey, blow out his kneecaps and _drag_ him into it. I’ll be there shortly.” Fife uttered a dark little _‘yes, my lord’_ with a nasty chuckle, and the comm clicked back off again to return silence to the room.

And it _was_ silent. Their hands stayed tightly linked and neither of them said a thing. The reality of what they were going to have to come face to face with, of what had to be dealt with very soon and couldn’t be ignored robbed them both of any desire to speak.

Hondo Ohnaka, here on Morix.

It had been two years since the fall of the Republic. They’d taken their chance, stopped running, and like all things inevitable, the consequences of that decision had finally caught up with them.

Other than the gangs, Maul had never intended that anyone from their pasts that knew them--anyone that remembered their names and faces well and who they were or what they were worth to the Empire-- _ever_ make contact, ever again. It had been the real motivation driving his security protocols since Morix’s conception, but like all his plans that failed he’d made the fatal mistake of allowing someone other than himself the power to pass judgement, and now Krim, that useless, product-sampling _addict_ had let an old enemy--a _known_ enemy--sneak in through their defenses while Maul’s back was turned.

 _Eliminating him and his entire syndicate would be a fitting punishment for his oversight. Establishing a new crew at Kessel will take more time than I have to spare unfortunately, the market as closely guarded as it is. I’ll deal with him and his_ **_failure_ ** _later._

Hondo had stolen from the various crime families for years, so the fact that he’d so easily fooled them into letting him into the fold was unreservedly _infuriating_.

 _A falsified identity and a contract with the Pyke Syndicate, all to get to me. Is he here seeking_ _further vengeance? His easy forgiveness of his men’s betrayal doesn’t paint him the type to hold a grudge._

Maul also had his doubts that Ohnaka possessed the brain capacity for _any_ form of higher thought, or mental stamina to maintain interest. There was always the possibility that he was being made to do this, either by force or for payment, and the whole setup was a trap. The pirate was obviously an opportunistic snake in the grass who valued credits over all else if his men were anything to go by, so it wasn’t an impossibility that the Pykes had hired him purposefully to--what, exactly? Use Maul’s known hatred of the pirate to distract him, so they could make their move while he was out in the open?

 _That, or they are being used themselves._ That theory held less water, if only because the gangs had it too good right now, easily better than they’d had it in years, so to jeopardize their collective security for one shoddily constructed grab at power was unlikely. There was always the slim chance another underworld group was amassing power under the radar, just as the Collective had, but the crime circuit was a small world and everyone drank from the same glass--he would have noticed any new players to the game.

 _So if not that, then what? Why is he_ **_here_** _? And, far more important, who told him where to find me?_

If it was the Pykes, and this was all their doing, then there was little cause for concern. The true danger lie in anyone _besides_ the Pykes telling him.

_Fools or traitors, the Pykes can be dealt with. If Black Sun is feeding secrets to outside sources, that will complicate matters immeasurably._

Maul felt Ahsoka unexpectedly go lax in his hand, and the weight of her arm slowly coming to rest flat on the table pulled him from his thoughts. The top of his hand eclipsed her’s, but he wouldn’t count it a victory; he never had liked winning on a technicality. 

“You know him,” Maul said, putting the obvious out into the air between them. “Hondo Ohnaka.”

Ahsoka looked up at him, that same recognition at Ohnaka’s name lingering on her face. The past year of residing, training, working, and living together had eroded most of the barriers they’d built up between them save for the very strongest, and neither of them bothered to hide the little things dwelling on the surface--she let Maul feel freely what stirred in her, a mixture of trepidation swirling amidst disdain and a conflicted sort of half-respect

“Yes, I know him. That’s one word for it, I guess.” Her sarcastic tone detracted somewhat from the discomfort in her field. “I was luckier than Master Obi-Wan at least, I didn’t have to suffer knowing him well.”

There was fear in her too, but it was tepid, only on the very edge of her mind. Whatever she feared wasn’t Ohnaka himself, and that alone made it suddenly obvious to Maul what she did fear.

“You think he’ll remember you.” 

It wasn’t a question. Maul had already come to the same conclusion when he saw the flicker of recognition in Ahsoka’s eyes and understood implicitly the danger of her accompanying him to the docks--that despite years passing, her growth both in height and weight, and a whole new face mercilessly seared into her skin, Hondo might see through it regardless. Personally the half-Sith didn’t give Hondo that much credit, or any at all really, and not for the first time the thought crossed his mind that he should have chased down and slaughtered the insolent pirate back on Florrum when fate afforded him the chance, instead of chasing after Kenobi.

_Savage could have kept his arm, and I could have spared myself this surprise ‘visit’._

“He might. I can’t say for sure if he will or won’t. The man’s an idiot, but he’s not exactly stupid.”

Maul’s face twisted. “There’s a difference?”

He hadn’t meant it as a joke in the slightest, but Ahsoka blinked up in surprise at him--and then she laughed. Really, _actually_ laughed. The sound was high and bright, like a dazzling strobe in the Force; it vibrated up his arm from where their hands remained entwined, and dislodged something hard in Maul’s chest.

It was the first time he had ever heard her laugh.

Something else in his chest cracked right along with it, when he tried to recall if he ever heard his brother laugh. Surely he _must_ have, at _some_ point? Maul searched his memories, tried to conjure what simply _had_ to be there, and realized with a muted horror that he truly couldn’t remember if Savage had ever even _once_ laughed in their short time together.

Maul managed to barricade his cresting emotions before Ahsoka noticed. As open as they’d become, Maul still wasn’t… _at ease_ with letting the ex-Jedi in, not with things like this. Two years wasn’t long enough to undo what had already been done, not even close, and knowing it could take so much longer made Maul bitter.

He wished he’d started trying sooner. Ahsoka made him wish he’d started trying sooner.

_Perhaps then, with Savage, things might have been… better. For him. For the both of us._

“I needed that,” Ahsoka sighed, her laughter winding down. She wiped at the corner of her eye with her free hand, still giggling sporadically under her breath for a moment before finally getting herself back under control. All the tension in her had evaporated, leaving her Force signature calm, though the fire within it hadn’t diminished in the least. They still had a problem to take care of, quite the pressing one actually, but Maul had inadvertently cut the tension and with it put Ahsoka completely at ease.

The sense of pride that knowledge gave Maul was as foreign as it was familiar. 

It was impossible to ignore that Ahsoka had stopped squeezing his hand quite so hard, and so too had he relinquished his rigid hold of her’s. With the elaborate ritual of arm-wrestling forgotten they were just lightly holding onto the other for no real reason except that they hadn’t yet let go. Maul looked at their coupled hands and thought of how over a year ago he’d ripped away from Ahsoka’s seeking tactile touch, how much it had unsettled him and turned his stomach and thrilled him simultaneously… and how after they went to their separate rooms and he’d looked down at his red and black skin, he’d remembered Savage’s was the last hand he’d held.

It hadn’t even been _Savage’s_ hand, not really. Just a Mandalorian copy, cobbled together in an exile’s camp, held together by electrical tape and Nightsister magic.

 _Brother like brother, no flesh or bone--imitation Sith with imitation bodies. Force, the final comfort I gave him he couldn’t even_ **_feel_** _._

The memory of his brother’s mutilation at Kenobi’s hand, in aid to that _scum_ Ohnaka, dragged Maul back to the present, and his simmering hatred, his oldest and most reliable salve, soothed him momentarily.

“Listen,” Ahsoka was saying across from him, “Hondo’s absolutely an idiot, but when it comes to being a decent pirate he’s annoyingly competent. He wouldn’t have survived until now if he wasn’t. The man’s got cunning in spades unfortunately, and it would be just _like_ him to use what brain cells he has left to recognize me and put my life in danger for his own fortune.”

“Lady Tano, you wound me.”

Ahsoka crooked a brow at him. She started to open her mouth to say something, but Maul beat her to the punch.

“Do you actually think I would allow anyone that posed a threat to you to leave here alive?”

The weight of his words settled on them both. Struck silent, Ahsoka’s eyes widened and darted down to their linked palms. Maul, equally surprised by his own admission--an admission that ought not to have surprised anyone, least of all himself, when he’d done nothing _but_ be ready and willing to kill on Tano’s behalf since the beginning--began to pull away.

Ahsoka didn’t let him. She kept their hands together and slowly let her eyes drift back up to his face.

“I’m supposed to be protecting you,” she said, her mouth set in a firm line. “Not the other way around. Hondo came here looking for Darth Maul, not Ahsoka Tano.”

“Rubbing salt in the wound as well? That refuse couldn’t kill me the first time we crossed paths, not even with an entire crew and a Jedi on his side. If his goal is the same now, this attempt will not be any more successful than the last.”

“And if that’s not his goal?” Ahsoka asked. “What if he’s just here to confirm your location for someone else?”

As always, the ex-Jedi was sharp-witted, and Maul approved of how easily she saw to the root of things, but a crucial detail continued to escape her, and it tugged the corners of Maul’s mouth up into a malicious grin.

“Then you fundamentally misunderstand my intentions for our old _friend,_ Lady Tano,” he said, leaning in, tightening his grip on Ahsoka’s hand once again. “It does not _matter_ why he came. It will not _matter_ what he does or does not know. All that will matter when Ohnaka and I come face to face is how much he values his life, because I am only giving him one chance to keep it. If he gives me any inclination to doubt, then he is forfeit, and I will execute him without compromise.”

Ahsoka quietly took in the truthful answer Maul had given. He wondered if she would protest, and thought privately that the girl he dueled on Mandalore most certainly would have--that girl, still tied strongly to the Jedi and their peacekeeping ways, was so unmarred in the Force that despite calling him ‘hard to kill’ she had refused to let Maul die.

Maul wasn’t holding that girl’s hand. 

“Hondo captured me, during the Clone Wars,” she said, and the softness of her voice was like velvet lining in a box full of razor blades. “He told me he was going to sell me to someone willing to pay handsomely for a female Jedi. One who didn’t care if her body was warm when he bought it.”

Fury, hot and honey-slow, dripped down Maul’s spine.

“Is that so?” Maul heard himself ask, practically _hiss._ Unbidden, a name and face rose up from the depths of his past.

 _Eldra Kaitis. She nearly suffered a similar fate._ Was it a fate she could have saved herself from, had Maul never deemed to seek out a Jedi to test himself against? Or had his interference, his self-aggrandizing bloodlust, spared her a much slower, uglier death? Well over seventeen years had passed, and Maul remained unable to say for certain. 

He’d killed so many in his life, cut them down and never again spared them a thought. Kaitis, young and unfinished, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time--she came back to him often. Her’s was a death, if given the chance, Maul would take back. She haunted him, and looking at Ahsoka--someone who had been just as young and unfinished once, caught in the wrong place and time--Maul saw Eldra’s ghost in Tano’s face.

“I escaped, of course,” Ahsoka went on. “And in the end, Hondo helped me, and the younglings in my care. After that I suppose I respected his change of heart, even if it _did_ only come from him needing our help.”

“Hmm. In that case, perhaps I’ll kill him regardless.” Maul pulled his hand away and sighed internally with relief that Ahsoka let him. It was the longest they’d ever maintained physical contact, and if it hadn’t shifted from sporting aggression far too near to _comforting_ he might have tolerated it forever. Perhaps even basked in it. Hostility was easy, and it was familiar, and though it had long since ceased feeling _good_ he knew how to make his home in it. Comfort was not a word or a concept Maul could easily parse.

Where had all the hostility gone? Outside of training, he and Ahsoka had outgrown their venom; cast it off like ill-fitting clothes and gave up ever trying to make it fit again. Antagonizing each other for cruel amusement or revenge had been left behind. They remained competitive, sometimes combative, but the dynamic of it all had shifted so far from where they started Maul hardly recognized it.

Until, suddenly, he did.

_Siblings,_ he thought, gaze flitting back to Ahsoka and her confused expression. _We are like siblings._

And he had never been affectionate with Savage. He didn’t know how to be. Just another facet of life common to all but him, courtesy of his master; Ahsoka, on the other hand… she knew. She knew very well. He saw it in the way she challenged his authority on _everything,_ the way she smirked at his irritation with light in her eyes, the way she made a nuisance of herself simply to get under his skin.

He had felt it, in the way she wrapped his broken ribs. In the way she asked him to teach her. In the way she frequently and unabashedly sought him out for physical contact. Most damning of all was the way she saw him look at her, and knew right away the kind of person he was seeing.

Maul would die before telling Ahsoka that he too saw the way she looked at _him,_ and how loudly her spirit called out for Skywalker, and not because she saw in Maul the shadow of a Master.

 _Brother,_ it seemed to cry out. 

All along they’d been seeing the same thing in each other. The only difference was, this time, Ahsoka had the wealth of experience and Maul, well. He had never known _less_ about how to be a brother.

“Kill him anyway?” Ahsoka huffed in disbelief. “That’s a bit callous, even for you. Not that I’d try especially hard to stop you.”

A vicious delight bubbled up in Maul, and he laughed as he imagined running Ohnaka through with his lightsaber while Ahsoka only yawned, the way she sometimes did during long meetings.

“Monster that I am, I have never threatened to sell someone into sexual slavery, living _or_ dead,” Maul remarked. “Come, we’ve kept Fife waiting long enough.”

They rose in tandem, Maul and his Shadow.

“If we’re lucky he got impatient and just shot Hondo,” Ahsoka said, rolling her shoulder to loosen it again. Her muscles flexed and bulged with every rotation, and Maul wondered, had they not been interrupted, who _really_ would have won their game.

“And spare you the opportunity to reunite with your former _comrade?”_

Ahsoka looked at him like she wanted to remove his jaw with her bare hands, and that made Maul laugh too.

“Like you said,” Ahsoka sighed, following Maul out from their base and into the cool night air, “that depends entirely on him, and how badly he wants to live.”

“Oh?”

“Mm. If he doesn’t recognize me, if he says whatever he came here to say to you and doesn’t push his luck, then he’s free to go, intact. If he does, and if it’s going to be a _problem,_ then I’ll see to it our secrets _stay_ secret.”

Maul hummed in approval, dark joy swelling in the Force around him. Ahsoka wore the verity of her promise boldly on her sleeve, and Maul had no doubt it was a promise she would keep. Tano never spoke lightly of intentions--she’d made that clear from the moment they met--but her loyalty was different. It was not blind, like that of his men, and it wasn’t bought like that of the gangs. It was different even from the loyalty his own brother had given him; Savage’s loyalty was unconditional, and came from their shared blood and a guilt that was so deep, so bottomless that all the forgiveness in the galaxy would never have been enough to alleviate it.

Ahsoka’s loyalty Maul had _earned._ Earned over days and weeks and months, again and again, through patience and broken bones alike. The only thing Maul had possibly worked harder to earn was his Master’s approval, and Maul longed for a world where Ahsoka had been his singular investment.

 _“Our” secrets._ She had said “our”. Maul was infinitely thankful that the ex-Jedi remained ignorant of how easily she could topple him, using a word like that.

“And if it is not a problem?” Maul questioned, curiosity taking him. “What will you do then, Lady Tano?”

Ahsoka was resolute in the Force, but a thread of unease snaked faintly through it.

“If that’s the case,” she said, balling her hands into fists, “then I hope he’s prepared for a long stay, because I have questions, and he’s not leaving this rock until I get _answers_.”

\-----------

  
  


Fife met them at the outskirts of the hangars, along with twenty other Pykes, and they were all armed to the teeth.

Ahsoka wasn’t surprised; after her own little _adventure_ on Oba Diah she’d seen first hand how invested they were in their shipments being paid for in a timely manner. The Pykes were in the business of smuggling drugs, not tolerating delays, and so what _was_ surprising was that when they reached where Hondo’s ship was docked the man himself was not only breathing, but his kneecaps were miraculously untouched.

Smartly, Hondo had followed orders to wait in his ship, but he hovered just inside the very edge of the doorway at the top of the ramp. As Ahsoka and Maul approached with their gun-toting entourage Hondo was engaged in a game of chicken with the guards waiting for him on the landing pad, sticking his foot out like he was going to take a step and then yanking it back before it could be shot.

A dozen or so laser burns dotted the ramp and hull of his ship--Ahsoka noted that his pant legs were scorched at the ankles by a few close calls on either side.

When he saw Maul, Hondo froze, boot poised mid-step.

“Ah, there he is, the man I have been waiting for! How are you, my horny-headed friend?”

Ahsoka stayed a step behind Maul and to the right of his shoulder, hood raised and hands concealed in the sleeves of her robes. She couldn’t see Maul’s expression but she could feel the hurricane that was his field, slowly picking up speed with every second.

“All will be well, as soon as you fulfill your contractual obligations to the Collective,” Maul said, voice icy calm yet searing with promise. He signaled for the men at the end of the ramp to lower their weapons, and with their barrels aimed toward the ground Hondo took that as his cue to come strolling down onto the landing pad.

“Ah, isn’t that better?” Hondo laughed, holding his arms wide in greeting. “It has been quite some time, hasn’t it?”

“Quite,” Maul said, deceptively placid. “The credits?” Less than an inch apart Ahsoka was embroiled in his presence in the Force--he was cataclysmic, an inch from turning into a natural disaster. 

_I’m impressed, he’s really reining it in right now. I should have commed Fife on the way here, we could have placed bets on how long before he snaps._

Hondo made a show of patting himself down, as if he were capable of concealing 50,000 credits in his pockets alone.

“Ha, oh, would you look at that? Seems I have left them on my ship!” 

Ahsoka couldn’t hold in the scoff at his blatant attempt to stall and drag their encounter out. For the first time Hondo noticed Maul wasn’t alone, attention drawn at the sound of her annoyance, and he caressed his chin as he looked her up and down, taking in what detail he could see peeking out from the shadow of her hood. 

“Perhaps your pretty friend would like to _accompany_ me, to go and retrieve--”

His words cut off as abruptly as his air flow. Hondo rose up off the ground, hands going right to his throat to claw at the invisible grip crushing his windpipe. Ahsoka saw over Maul’s shoulder that he’d raised his right hand the slightest fraction from his side, and she was impressed all over again at just how little effort it took him to lift and strangle a man.

Meanwhile Hondo choked and wheezed, kicking and struggling futilely in a way that was almost comical. She tamped down a chuckle--couldn’t ruin her stoic bruiser image, obviously--and let Maul asphyxiate the Weequay for another second or two. As much as she loved fighting and violence for the thrill of it she still wasn’t partial to torture, even if it was on her behalf.

 _Does he even realize what he’s acting like?_ Ahsoka thought, distinctly aware of the source of Maul’s overprotective action. She buried the feeling of just how happy it made her as far down as she possibly could, and then leaned forward to gently touch Maul’s back through her robe.

“Save some for the rest of us, huh?” she whispered, hiding a smirk. “If he wants an escort, I’ll do it.”

Maul held Hondo suspended a bit longer, then dropped him much harder than necessary, practically throwing him face first onto the tarmac several feet away. Hondo wasted no time in gasping for breath, hacking and coughing desperately with what surely had to be burning lungs. The small crowd of Pykes around them all tittered and clicked, pointing and laughing while the pirate retched on his hands and knees.

“A shame, the men have been speculating for months on when they might see you put another fool in his place,” Maul said with a slanted smile. Behind his eyes lurked something completely unlike amusement, however. Ahsoka had seen the same look in Rex’s, Obi-Wan’s, and Anakin’s eyes, more times than she could count.

 _Little sister,_ they said.

“If they weren’t so toothless, gutless, and spineless, they could experience it firsthand,” Ahsoka replied sweetly. “Try not to get overthrown while I’m gone. And don't worry,” she taunted, jarring him with her elbow playfully, ignoring the way it protested further abuse after their earlier wrestling. Ahsoka was rewarded by the stiffening of Maul’s shoulders, affronted in the way he always was when she saw through him so easily.

She slid out from behind him and walked away without waiting for him to formulate a properly cutting remark, heading to where Hondo had begun to climb to his feet, with lengthy strides that billowed the many black layers of her Crimson Dawn regalia. Her proximity silently banished every gangster in her immediate vicinity--they fled from Hondo to give Ahsoka all the space she needed, though they stayed dutifully in firing range.

“Take me to the payment,” she ordered, dropping her voice an octave. “Now.”

Hondo looked up at her from the ground, still rubbing at his neck, and predictably he was grinning again, because of course not even near death could stop Hondo Ohnaka from being an incorrigible _ass._ He wavered as he got to his feet, and started to say something.

Ahsoka had run out of patience, unfortunately. She reached for the vibroblade in the small of her back, unsheathing it about halfway before Hondo wisely turned on his heel and started marching back to his ship.

“Right! The payment! This way, this way, follow me, come, come, come!”

She stayed at his heels, blade drawn and glinting, and let him lead her up the walkway and into the interior of his ship.

\--

“Ah, you’ll have to pardon my mess, it’s been some time since I... entertained.”

He wasn’t kidding. Hondo’s ship _was_ a mess. 

_I see the new social order hasn't been very kind to you._ His current state of affairs was a far cry from the modest empire he once held rule over. 

Empty bottles of liquor littered the floors amidst a sea of dirty laundry, while every surface was covered with weapons, dirty cups, and stacks of vintage Twi’lek erotica.

Ahsoka didn’t respond. She stayed in the entryway of the shuttle where the air didn’t scrunch her nose to smell and held her vibroblade where Hondo could be reminded of its purpose. 

“Not the chatty type? That’s too bad,” Hondo lamented, shoving things out of the way while he searched. He opened and closed several containers in rapid succession, found them empty, and tossed them aside. “Because you know, I’ve been told I’m a _very_ cunning linguist, and--”

The knife whistled when Ahsoka sent it sailing across the room, burying it all the way to the hilt in the wall directly between Hondo’s legs. It cut so close to him that he had to stand on his toes to save slicing the seam of his trousers. Right away his hands were raised placatingly and he laughed, much higher than before.

“Kidding! Just kidding! Haaa ha ha! Not one for jokes either, it would seem.”

Ahsoka let out an aggravated exhale through her nose, and made up her mind.

_I’ll take the risk. I’ll never get my answers if I don’t._

“The only joke here is you, Hondo," Ahsoka said in her normal cadence. "You haven’t changed one bit.” 

She yanked the vibroblade from the wall with a short, angry jerk of the Force, and called it whizzing back to her. She returned it to its sheathe, and with her other hand pulled back her hood.

As her face became fully exposed to the neon light of the ship, she saw Hondo’s eyes blow open wider than dinner plates. His arms dropped to his sides and he let the wall take his weight. The only word to describe him was deflated. One good look at Ahsoka’s face paired with her voice knocked more wind out of him than Maul could choke out--all at once his front of roguish charm and bravado faltered, crumbling to join the rest of the garbage on the floor.

Despite time, despite tattoos, despite it all, she had made far too great an impression for Hondo to ever forget her.

Ahsoka let him gawk. Looking around she quickly found the controls for the entryway and wasted no time in shutting and locking the door.

“You’re alive,” Hondo murmured. He rubbed his eyes and blinked at her, then did it again, just to be certain. “I cannot believe it. You are alive!” A bark of disbelief burst from him, and he pushed himself off from the wall, staring at Ahsoka with a mix of awe and skepticism, hands on his hips. “I did not think any of the Jedi had survived.”

“We didn’t,” Ahsoka said. “The Jedi are no more.”

“But you are here! Right in front of me! You look very different, not sure I like the red, but you--”

“No. More.” She walked to Hondo with measured steps, and let the gravity of her words sink in. “Do you understand? There are no Jedi left in the galaxy, and there are no force-wielders on Morix.”

As a girl she’d had to crane her neck to look Hondo in the eye proper. She stood much taller now, and with the added height of her growing montrals she was a _tower._ Ahsoka used every inch to cow him into submission, advancing step by step, steering him, until the back of his knees hit the dashboard of the cockpit and sprawled him over it.

“Say it, Hondo. I need you to say it, and I need you to mean it. You know that I’ll know if you don’t, and if you don’t, then I will _not_ save you from what’s waiting for you outside that door.”

He gaped at her, their roles from the war so thoroughly reversed he didn’t know how to proceed. Ahsoka did, and taking her chance to relish in some poetic irony of her own, she seized Hondo’s chin in a vice and ran her thumb over his lower lip as he had once done to her, pressing on it hard enough to cut it against his teeth, split the center with her nail, and leave a swiftly swelling bruise.

“Maul is going to kill you,” she informed him plainly. “And the only reason he won’t is if I tell him not to. And the only reason I would tell him that is if I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that you will _never_ tell another soul we’re alive.” She released his face, pulling her hand away to wipe on her robe. “That, and one _other_ condition.”

Hondo coughed into his fist and tried--and failed--to surreptitiously cross his legs, wincing as he did so. “Name your price, strange woman I have never met before in my entire life, who is also most certainly _not_ any kind of laser-sword wielding space wizard.”

“I have questions about what’s going on outside this moon. What’s _really_ going on, not just what they show in the aetherwave news cycle and on the holonet. You’ve always been privy to the underbelly of the galaxy. All I want is some answers. Come with me to the bar, tell me what I want to know, and you get to leave Morix with everything still attached and functional. Deal?”

“You had me at bar,” Hondo beamed. “It’s a deal!”

“Good.” Ahsoka stepped back, tugging the pirate to his feet by the arm. “Now quit wasting our time, and get the damn credits. You have thirty seconds, and then I’m comming Maul. Move it.”

Hondo acquiesced gladly, though at the second mention of Maul he quirked a brow at her, an unspoken question on his mind. He was apt enough to not ask about their partnership with the clock ticking, and produced the credits without any further delays.

They went down the ramp together, Hondo with the case under his arm and Ahsoka with her hood back up. The length of time the retrieval took probably looked suspicious, but Hondo’s bruised and bloodied mouth was a good cover; the Togruta sensed nothing amiss from the men whatsoever. Nothing but satisfaction permeated the Force at the sight of the long awaited credits.

Maul met them at the end of the walkway. Ahsoka saw his gaze dart from Hondo’s split lip to her and she shrugged lightly, her hood concealing her smirk to all but the half-Sith.

“Here we are, all 50,000 credits, as I promised,” Hondo announced, slapping the front of the case. He held it out at arms length, but Maul didn’t take it. He snapped his fingers and Fife came forward instead, taking hold of the case with the hand that wasn’t pointing a blaster at Hondo’s face.

“Then our business is concluded,” Fife sneered, plucking the credits from Hondo’s grasp. “Consider your contract with the Pyke Syndicate terminated.”

“Oh no, what a tragedy, however will I go on?” Hondo muttered, rolling his eyes. He went still when Fife shoved the barrel of his blaster directly against his temple.

“Shall I terminate _him_ as well, my Lord?” Fife inquired politely. “Or, would you prefer…?” The question was left open-ended for Maul to fill with whatever he wished, an order Ahsoka knew would be carried out with no hesitation.

Maul waved the Pyke away, quickly filling up the space he’d occupied at Hondo’s side. Ahsoka watched him pull his lightsaber from its clip at his belt and press it squarely to Hondo’s stomach--simultaneously she felt the air change around them, felt it go suffocatingly cold with the half-Sith’s will. His thumb caressed the saber’s ignition with fatal promise.

“I will ask you this only once,” he said. “Who told you where to find me, and why did you come?”

Hondo must not have expected such an easy question to have to answer, because he immediately burst into laughter teeming with relief.

“Who _told_ me? The better question is who _didn’t_ tell me! This cute little moon is a smuggler’s dream, it’s all anyone on the fringes is talking about these days. But! Just to be as clear as Corellian crystal, no one actually _told_ me _you_ were the one in charge, not in so many words, no no _no._ Very fortuitous it was, really, I was trying to find some connections to a more lucrative career now that the Empire has ruined everyone’s harmless fun robbing the shipping routes, and I overheard some men discussing their recent contracts to something called the Shadow Collective.

“I bought them a few drinks, we talked, we laughed, on and on and on, and then they mentioned passing black market goods through someplace called Morix, and _then_ they mentioned catching a glance of the most TERRIFYING man they had ever SEEN, walking around giving orders like he owned the place!”

Hondo paused to gesture to Maul.

“That would be you, by the way. I asked them to describe this devil of a man, and wouldn’t you know, they told me of a red and black Zabrak with eyes like something out of their nightmares. I thought, there is no way it is him, but then I asked if this hideous creature had legs made of metal, and when they said yes, HA!”

The pirate clapped his hands together in reminisced success. “After that, I simply _had_ to see for myself if the man they saw was who I thought he was, and! Here you are!” At that Hondo grinned, as if that explained everything and no further explanation was needed.

“A whim?” Ahsoka said, absolutely at a loss. “You went through all this for a _whim?”_

Hondo nodded, serious as she’d ever seen him. “Of course. Nothing keeps a man up at night like unconfirmed suspicions.”

Ahsoka groaned internally. He really _hadn’t_ changed. She was too exasperated to be furious though, and bizarrely, a part of her was… almost glad. Nothing was the way it had been, and everything had changed so much since the end of war.

It was oddly comforting then, to see that some things were still the same. Some people, as deplorable as they might sometimes be, were right where she left them.

Maul, on the other hand, didn’t share in her sentiment.

“I should kill you where you stand,” Maul said, low and even. “I told you when last we parted, _scum,_ that you would pay for your insolence, and I believe the time has come for me to collect.”

Ahsoka’s hand shot out before Maul had even finished speaking.

“No,” she told him, her fingers wrapping tightly around his. Their fields collided, twisted, and then melded, all in the blink of an eye--Ahsoka was no longer in a mood to let any more time be wasted on words, so she dropped what few remaining shields stood in the way of her thoughts, all but shoving her surface-level consciousness at Maul.

_I haven’t gotten my answers yet. Hondo knowing we’re here isn’t going to be a problem, not that I can see. If that somehow changes after I get what I want, then I’ll do what needs to be done. If it doesn’t, and you’d still prefer him gutted, then I’ll gladly stand aside._

Maul glared, field brimming with agitation. Ahsoka held that glare, daring him to try to deny her. She wasn’t going to back down and he knew it, just as she knew that Maul had never denied her in the past and wouldn’t be starting now.

Hondo, still trapped between them with a lightsaber to his chest, cleared his throat.

“So… you said something about a bar?”

Ahsoka cast him a withering look, then drummed her fingers on the back of Maul’s hand and jerked her head away from Hondo. Maul belted his lightsaber.

“If he moves, shoot him,” Maul instructed, and he and Ahsoka walked far enough from the Weequay that he wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop, leaving him to be surrounded by a circle of Pykes with itchy trigger fingers.

“Oh, come come, what is this? And here I thought we were friends again!” Ahsoka heard Hondo cry dramatically as he was left behind.

Once they were reasonably alone, Maul looked like he was preparing to launch into something dangerously close to an interrogation, and Ahsoka was having none of it.

“Can you survive without me for an hour or so?” she asked without preamble. “Seeing as how you survived being cut in half, I’m going to go ahead and assume that’s a yes.”

Maul crossed his arms, disdain evident in every line of his body. “So you _do_ intend to go alone.”

“Look, I’d prefer not to. I don’t relish the thought of spending _any_ amount of time with Hondo, least of all alone, but I don’t think he’ll be very forthcoming with you sitting there holding a plasma sword to his throat the whole time.”

The half-Sith didn’t look convinced--Ahsoka already knew why. He’d seen what was dwelling in her mind, he knew the kind of questions she was planning to ask, questions she had pointedly not filled him in on during their entire trek from the base to the docks.

But Ahsoka’s dislike of leaving Maul’s back unguarded was genuine, and he’d seen that in her mind too. She wasn’t holding back from letting him feel her apprehension either, because if this _was_ all some elaborate ploy, if someone _was_ lying in wait to finally make their move to seize Maul’s enterprise, no time would be better to do so than with his bodyguard far away and distracted.

She had to remind herself he’d run his affairs perfectly fine without her, without being murdered, for the entire four months she’d gone off on her own. It also really couldn’t be overstated enough that not even bisecting him at the waist was capable of killing him, and if Maul could live through that, then he could feasibly live through just about anything.

Still.

Ahsoka reached out and spread her palm flat across the center of Maul’s chest, sought out the reassuring warmth of him through his robe and the steadying sound of the beat of his hearts. Like always he froze up at the contact, going so rigid he had to hold his breath, and just like always he did nothing to stop her.

“One hour,” she swore. “That’s all I ask.”

Maul regarded her for a long moment. He wasn't happy with her, that much was obvious, but in the Force his presence had become small; the metaphysical equivalent to stepping aside.

“Lady Tano, that is all you have ever needed to do.”

\--

Once upon a time, Ahsoka had told herself she would never call Maul a friend. She’d told herself a lot of things like that in the beginning, secret oaths she’d stake her life on only to turn around and break, just as secretly.

_If you make all your promises to yourself, the only one you can betray is you._

Because she _didn’t_ call Maul “friend”. She never had. Two years had passed and the word hadn’t left her mouth a single instance that she could recall. Ahsoka tried, in fact, to never give _any_ name to the strange connection they’d painstakingly built in their twenty months of hiding together. Naming it would make it real, realer than Ahsoka could keep believably dismissing as a means to an end to survive in the wreckage of what used to be her way of life.

Her rational sense kept trying to remind her that Maul shouldn't _be_ anything to her, that she was never supposed to be here or take part in any of this, and that her _real_ family was dead and Maul would never, _ever_ take their place.

Ahsoka’s heart didn’t share the burdens of her mind. It was under no obligation to be rational.

 _Brother,_ her heart said, even when her lips would not.

\--

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we are, only one more chapter to go. The final chapter is the one I started this fic to write, everything that happens in it is the whole reason I started writing this story, and no matter how it turns out, I'm really glad I got back into my old craft, and I'm beyond thankful for everyone that's read this far.
> 
> Once again, I can also be found as d0nkarnage on tumblr! I'm thinking about maybe taking some short writing prompts in the future, so if there's something ya'll would like to potentially see, don't be afraid to hit me up!


	10. How'd It Get To Be Only Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When you just can't shake the  
> Heavy weight of living  
> When you just can't seem to shake  
> The weight of living

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I severely underestimated just how much material I needed to cover for the final chapter, and when I saw how long the chapter was looking to be, I decided it might be more digestible if broken up, so SUPRISE it's gonna be 11 chapters now! Which is probably for the best, this chapter is primarily lighthearted (mostly) and can act as a nice breather for what comes next.

For as much as Ahsoka had once derided slummy establishments lacking class, she really had missed Lyn’vida’s bar.

Not that it was a _dive bar_ or anything, but it wasn’t exactly a Coruscanti VIP lounge overlooking the financial district, either. Morix had other bars, farther from the starport, aimed at clientele and thugs with more creds than the working class low-lifes who poured the drinks, and those were the bougie sort set distinctly aside from all the rest.

The gangsters didn’t want to drink with the dock workers or merchants, not often enough to warrant everyone sharing a single club, so each syndicate had their own place with their own atmosphere set up to their liking. Black Sun was all black and gold arches, high-backed chairs, very faux-royalty; a place to sip liquor that cost more than your ship poured by sweet young things in uniforms that left nothing to the imagination. The Pykes were all hot pink neon and camtonos of spice for centerpieces with wall-to-wall holoscreens playing non-stop pornography.

They built the kind of bars they’d like to frequent, and then frequented them. Lyn’s bar though, that was Crimson Dawn’s place, and nothing at all about it reflected the tastes of the man who had paid to build it.

“Boss doesn’t drink,” she had shrugged when Ahsoka deigned to bring it up, once upon a time. “Don’t think he’s ever even set foot in here, now that you mention it. Figured it’s more my problem than his, so I made it mine, and I haven’t had any complaints yet. Other than the spotchka, anyway.”

Spotchka, as it turned out, was the dirt cheap home-brewed swill Lyn had served Ahsoka her first time in--and it was still blue, still fizzy, and still absolutely _foul._ Ahsoka had already made the decision to serve it exclusively to Hondo because she was _not_ treating him; this was a glorified interrogation and _not_ a night on the town. If he survived their encounter then he could get his jollies buying whatever he pleased on his own creds, and only then.

The way she saw it she was on the clock, and her only job was to get Ohnaka so blindingly drunk he couldn’t lie if he wanted to.

“Here we are,” Ahsoka announced when the bar was in sight. Her grip on Hondo’s arm--which she’d maintained since dragging him from the landing bay--loosened a fraction.

“Oh, finally!” Hondo crowed, throwing the other arm up in relief. “I must tell you, I haven’t had a decent drink in parsecs!”

“Yeah?” Ahsoka asked. She let go of his arm as the metal doors began to hiss open and shoved Ohnaka into the dim, smoky haze beyond. “Well you’re not about to have one now.”

Hondo toppled inside, just managing to keep his balance. Ahsoka was right behind, taking his elbow in her grip again. At the sound of their entry a smattering of heads perked up to see who had come in, and while most went right back to minding their business a few called out in greeting, and waved.

“Fulcrum!”

“There she is!”

“Haven’t seen you in a God’s age, where you been?”

Stressed and stretched thin as she was, Ahsoka was helpless against the rush of warmth in her chest and the ambient happiness radiating from the regulars who, clearly, had missed her. She’d only lived amongst them for a few months, hadn’t really gotten particularly close to more than a handful of people, yet they’d missed her.

She could feel Hondo’s eyes on her, looking her over in a way very different from how he had inside his ship.

“Fulcrum, eh?” he asked under his breath, the corner of his mouth tugged into a sly grin. “An alias and everything, so mysterious! I love it.” 

Ahsoka bore down with her swordswoman’s strength on Hondo’s elbow, about to snap at him that nothing about her was for _him_ to love, when someone else called her name.

Two someones, actually.

“Oh my _Goddess,_ Fulcrum!?” two voices said in tandem. Two very familiar voices, belonging to the only other people she’d really hung around with during her time away from Maul besides the bartender. Hondo turned around at the same time Ahsoka did, and she tried not to smirk at the way his jaw hit the floor.

Two gorgeous Twi’lek women, both blue as ocean sapphire and draped in gold chiffon, rushed across the bar to throw their arms around Ahsoka, leaving Hondo shoved completely to the side. Ahsoka’s grip on his elbow became non-existent; she knew he wasn’t going to run, so she released him and put her hands to better use pulling the Gella sisters closer. 

“Ann, Tann,” Ahsoka said with a rare breed of smile reserved for them, and only them. “I missed you.”

The Gella twins, seven years or so the Togruta’s seniors, had once been slaves. Their necks still bore the scars of electroshock collars worn far too long, though they’d been free nearly a decade now. Ahsoka had met them in the hallway of the work housing on their way to Black Sun’s nightclub, where they worked as servers--after trading names and a few coy one-liners they’d given Ahsoka their commlink codes, and the rest was history.

Both women pulled away just far enough to devour Ahsoka with their eyes, then promptly went back to hugging her from both sides.

“If you missed us, why didn’t you come see us?” Ann asked, shoving her face into the crook of Ahsoka’s neck and montral.

“Yeah, we haven’t heard a word from you since you joined Crimson Dawn!” Tann added, copying her sister.

Ahsoka cradled the back of both their heads with each hand, and chose to forget Hondo was still staring at them, as well as half the bar, who were suddenly much more invested in the new arrival. Any of the workers who had been there during Ahsoka’s brief stint as a mechanic only laughed amongst themselves goodnaturedly, a few even raised their glasses. Her relationship with the twins was old news to them, and considering how much everyone working on Morix adored the Gellas, they were probably happy to see them reunited.

 _How sweet it would be, to stay reunited._ Nothing could have sounded better at that moment than to forgo her whole purpose for returning to the bar and go with the twins back to their room in the boarding house, and pick up where they left off a year ago. Nothing could have been more impossible either, for now at least, because the clock continued to tick and she still needed answers.

Behind her, Hondo coughed loudly, getting all three women’s attention.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” he asked, eyes twinkling. Ahsoka’s face screwed up in aggravation, and she started to say _no, we don’t have time,_ which she would have quickly followed up with _and if you even think of touching them I’ll gut-fuck you with a lightsaber,_ but the twins answered him first.

“I’m Tann, this is my sister, Ann. We’re Fulcrum’s girlfriends.”

“Are we?” Ann inquired playfully. “Does a year of silence constitute as a break-up, or just a break?” They both laughed, and ignored Hondo completely when he tried to speak again, choosing instead to fawn over Ahsoka and her lush new appearance they’d previously only seen from a distance.

“Black is lovely on you, you know, it really brings out the red in your montrals,” Tann lavished, bunching her fingers into the rich fabric of Ahsoka’s robe. She hefted the gold Crimson Dawn insignia off Ahsoka’s chest with both hands, marveling at her reflection in it--she replaced it with care, leaving both her palms to linger below the ex-Jedi’s clavicles.

“And those _arms_ ,” Ann sighed wistfully, biting her lip. She groped at the dense muscle hiding under Ahsoka’s sleeves, and absolutely _squealed_ with delight when Ahsoka flexed them for her, all but melting against her hip.

Ahsoka’s face was quickly becoming more red than orange, so she summoned her self control long enough to extract herself from their embraces, field heavy with regret.

“Sorry girls,” she smiled apologetically, “but I’ve got some pressing syndicate business I need to take care of. You know how it is.” Their crestfallen faces were enough to break Ahsoka’s heart. 

“But,” she added, “if Maul proves he can go five minutes without needing my help, maybe I can trust him to be left alone again, and I can come see you? If you’ll still have me, that is.”

Both women gave her a petulant pout of disapproval that neither could sustain. 

“Fine,” they said together, before leaning in to plant a kiss on each of Ahsoka’s cheeks. “After that though, we won’t wait again, got it?”

Ahsoka nodded, and gave them each a kiss of their own. She’d kissed no one else since taking Maul up on his offer--feeling their warm lips on hers really was a bit like picking up where she’d left off.

The twins smiled like Ahsoka had promised them the galaxy in the palm of their hands, their joy pure starlight in the Force. They folded into her again, brushed their lekku briefly against her montrals, and stepped away with matching lingering looks of want. Then they melded back into the crowd they’d come from, like they’d never been there at all.

Ahsoka let out a long, slow breath. It rattled in her chest longer than it had any right to.

_Back to business._

Hondo was watching her when she reached for him again, looking pleased as punch.

“You know, I always had a feeling,” he said with that same sly grin.

“A feeling, like I’m going to shatter your elbow if you keep talking?” Ahsoka asked, grinning right back. “That kind of feeling? Because I think I feel it, too.”

Hondo’s mouth closed so fast his teeth clicked, but his aura was as smug as ever as Ahsoka grabbed and steered him toward the bar. Lyn was there waiting for them, evidently having watched their whole interaction from the way she laughed and shook her head as they approached.

“Those girls did a lot of crying when you up and left,” Lyn’vida said. “Don’t tell me you swung by just to dash their hopes and dreams again?”

“No. Not intentionally, anyway. I came here to use your backroom. Your bar is the only one I know isn’t bugged, and I told _this one_ I could buy him a drink for some info, or I could kill him.” Ahsoka tossed Hondo against the counter for emphasis, earning her a pained _oof_ from the pirate.

“Chose the drink then, I take it?” Lyn chuckled. “Smart man.”

“That remains to be seen,” Ahsoka replied. Lyn’vida chuckled again, ducked her head under the counter and came back up with a passkey, a triangular cylinder on a keychain, with a little plastic Jawa dangling along with it. She was also holding a blaster, which _also_ had a little plastic Jawa dangling from it, and she pointed it lazily at Hondo who didn’t look the least bit surprised.

“Doesn’t it though?” Lyn smiled. “Hello, Hondo.”

“Viiiiida,” he purred in response. He leaned across the counter, shamelessly pressing into the barrel of the blaster. “You know, I was worried you were going to let me walk away for a second there. I thought, perhaps maybe, you had forgotten me.”

“If only I could, you miserable sack of sithspit.”

Hondo giggled like a schoolboy and dropped both his elbows onto the counter, propping his chin up to gaze lovingly at the middle-aged Twi’lek.

“What’s a woman of your caliber doing in a place like this, eh? Wait wait wait, don’t tell me--leave some suspense, for later.”

Ahsoka rolled her eyes and slapped a hand down on Hondo’s shoulder hard enough to knock him off his elbows and onto his face, catching him at the last second by the back of his coat collar and yanking him up like a lothcat by the scruff.

“Assuming you get a later,” the ex-Jedi huffed. “C’mon, we’re wasting time.”

“Aww, you got to flirt with long-lost lovers, unfair!”

Lyn tossed the passkey to Ahsoka, who snatched it deftly out of the air. 

“I wouldn’t call what we had _loving_ ,” the Twi’lek drawled as she stashed the blaster away.

“But it _was_ fun,” Hondo insisted. 

Lyn’vida scoffed, but didn’t protest. She gave them her back to start pointedly cleaning glasses, and Ahsoka figured that was the end of that, and started dragging Hondo toward the backroom by the arm. Before they were completely out of earshot though, Lyn called out a final time.

“Hey! In case you don’t give him the messy end he’s got coming, send him my way when you’re done, huh?”

Hondo’s face split in a bright smile, and even as he was being hauled off he twisted enough to shoot finger-guns at Lyn, waggling his brows all the while.

“Ohoho, a _different_ kind of messy end? That’s what Hondo likes to hear!”

_Maul was right, we should have just killed him. No information is worth this._

Unless it was, in which case she only had to put up with Hondo Ohnaka a little while longer. She could do this--the tables were turned this time, and he was completely at her mercy. No force-suppression cuffs, no blaster to her head, no rough hands on her face; she had all the power here. Ahsoka could take what she wanted from Hondo and tear him apart as easily as she did a fresh slab of rancor meat and sleep well the same night, consequence free, save what her conscience might torture her with after the fact _if_ it tortured her at all.

 _Force, is this what it feels like to be Maul? No wonder he’s… like_ **_that_** _._

It felt good. 

“Send in whichever spotchka tastes the worst, please,” Ahsoka waved over her shoulder, vanishing around the corner of the hall that led to the backroom, and the din of the bar patrons was just loud enough to drown out Hondo’s groan of abject disappointment.

\--

The backroom matched the aesthetic of the rest of Lyn’s establishment, rustic and a bit dingy, but in a charming sort of way.

It also sported the nicest seating in the whole bar, a fine circular booth with a low chrome table situated in the center, and it was upon that plush vintage upholstery that Ahsoka flung Ohnaka the second they were through the door.

“The audacity!” Hondo cried while Ahsoka hovered at the door, waiting for her ordered bribe. “The temerity! The _drama_!”

He’d recovered in record time--Ahsoka only took her eyes off him for a moment, just to glance back and see he’d spread out on his side in the booth, one leg up with his head propped up in his hand again.

“I just want you to know, I’m having a wonderful time,” he smiled.

Ahsoka dropped her face into her hand, massaging at her temples furiously.

_There is no emotion, there is peace. There is no emotion, there is peace. There is no emotion, there is--_

“Here you are Fulcrum, one jug of the nastiest backwash I ever wrung out of a dishrag back into the pitcher.” Lyn’vida was standing next to her, holding out the promised booze in one hand and a poorly polished cup in the other. “Figured you weren’t partaking this time around.”

Ahsoka actually hadn’t had a drop of liquor since taking up with Maul. She felt, distinctly, that that was about to change as she accepted the decanter and glass.

“Not this time. Thanks though, Lyn. Really.” The Twi’lek gave her a cheeky salute and a wink, and then she too returned to the clamoring crowd. Ahsoka watched her go, and once she was gone the ex-Jedi stepped back into the room and pressed the passkey into the interior lock, turning it home until the doors sealed closed with an ominous hiss.

Finally, at last, she and Hondo were alone.

Ahsoka cast a look over her shoulder--Hondo was still sprawled out along the seats, watching her with an intense focus, with a hint of amusement. It was the way he’d looked at her when he’d heard her alias; it reminded her of how people looked watching holodramas on the ‘net.

“Alright, I’ve held up my end of the deal.” Ahsoka brought the spotchka to the table, dropping it down in front of Ohnaka as she threw the glass into his lap. “Time for you to uphold yours.”

Obligingly Hondo righted himself and got right to drinking. He filled the cup to the brim, stopping to regard Ahsoka over the lip of it before he tipped his head and took his first long sip.

“Ahhh. That’s just terrible,” Hondo smiled. “It’s been twenty years and it still tastes the same. I’m glad I got to try it again.”

Ahsoka could sense an uncharacteristic fondness in the pirate, a real warmth spreading out from within him that had nothing to do with the liquor in his hand.

“You and Lyn have a falling out?”

“Mm, something like that, yes. She was quite the smuggler and thief in her day, very bold. Always robbing from the kind of people you do not steal from, always getting away with it, until she didn’t.”

Ahsoka knew she was working with a finite amount of time, but her curiosity was peaked. “You’ve stolen from everyone from farmers to the Jedi, who _exactly_ is off-limits?”

Hondo swirled his glass. “Bounty hunters, of course. Farmers and gangs and even the Jedi knew that getting accosted by pirates and smugglers was a fact of life. Not hunters though, they take everything so _personally_! That is why I prefer to have them as allies, _not_ enemies. But Lyn, well… she’s had a taste for unique little knick-knacks all her life, and bounty hunters always seem to have the most interesting plunder in their holds.”

“Who did she try to rob?”

“That bald blue fellow, I forget his name, what was it--Cod Bone? No no, Bad Cane?”

 _Cad Bane. No wonder she didn’t get away with it._ That put several things about Lyn’vida in a new light for Ahsoka, who now had a whole new respect for the Twi’lek and the fearlessness she’d flaunted that confused Tano so much before.

“Anyway, we all thought she was dead. It was years until she resurfaced, only now she was working for some small-fry gang in the Mid Rim, and _maybe_ I said some less than gentlemanly things about it to her over comms, and _maybe_ she told me I was a sleemo and to drop dead, but who can say, really?”

Ahsoka rolled her eyes. _That explains the blaster then._

Hondo helped himself to another drink from his glass and paused to refill it. “Enough about all of that! Hondo Ohnaka is a man of his word, sometimes! You have questions, I only pray I have answers. So! What did you want to know?”

Here, the ex-Jedi took a long, steadying breath. This was it. This was why they had come. Ahsoka hoped against hope that Hondo could tell her something, anything, that filled in the blanks. Her and Maul’s self-imposed exile had purposely cut them off from the greater galaxy at large, kept them safe while simultaneously keeping them in the dark. It was a cruel mercy to them both, but Ahsoka knew something was happening beyond their borders, something that shouldn’t be ignored, not even for all the safety in the world. 

She’d been having visions in her dreams as of late. Visions of things that had passed, and of things that might. They had traveled full circle, and what the Force had once deemed to show her in the past it now saw fit to show her again: suffocating dark that stole the air from her lungs and the light from her eyes, a void so opaque in the Force it blinded every sense, and _pain,_ so much pain, pain in every form it could take, a suffering so tangible Ahsoka feared it might reach out through her own mind and touch her.

She feared that she might reach out and touch it back.

 _It can’t be him. It can’t. He’s dead. I felt him die in the Force. I_ **_felt_ ** _it. Anakin Skywalker is gone._

But if he was gone, why did the pain in her visions feel so… familiar?

“I want to know what the Empire is doing,” Ahsoka said eventually. “What they’re _really_ doing.”

Hondo scoffed over his cup derisively. “The Empire! Ha! Doing what they do best, of course, spreading _peace_ if you can call it that. All of the Core systems and most of the whole Mid Rim have been seized to be added to their collection of planets, and they call it a liberation! Can you believe that? _Liberation_!”

Ahsoka crossed her arms and leaned back into the booth. She’d been expecting this news, but that didn’t make it any easier to hear.

“Let me guess, they’re liberating people from lawlessness and chaos by instilling military occupation, all in the name of maintaining the peace.”

“Correct!” Hondo declared with a pointed finger. “And they are also _liberating_ their supplies, defensive systems, natural resources, and populations for their grand armies. Plenty who were already wiped out from the war joined without much of a fuss, since any who didn’t were, ahem, _convinced_. Very bad for business, as you can imagine. But!” he said, slamming his cup on the table for emphasis, “there is some good news!”

Ahsoka ran a hand over her face. “There is?”

“Yes, yes! You see, rumors are in abundance in these trying times, but Hondo Ohnaka has seen something that is fact, and… I think you will like it.” He pushed the jug of spotchka aside and bent closer, his eyes alight in the dim glow of the bar. “There is talk, amongst the smugglers. Talk of a rebellion.”

Ahsoka felt her heart stutter in her chest; memories of Onderon filtered through her mind.

“Saw Gerrera?” she asked. Hondo shook his head.

“He is involved, in a manner of speaking. The Partisans, I think they are calling themselves. Very extremist, and veeeery effective. But they are few, and not very popular, even with the rest of the movement. No, the one that might interest you is called the Rebel Alliance. Not the most creative name if you ask me, but hey, not my movement. It is helmed by a former senator from Alderaan.”

Hondo started to refill his glass again, and Ahsoka gripped her arms hard enough to still the twitching of her shoulders.

“Senator Organa,” she murmured. Ahsoka raked her field through Hondo, searching for any sign of dishonesty. She found none. “You say you know this for a fact. How?”

It was as if that was what Hondo was waiting to hear. The Weequay reared back, smug as could be, and whipped open his jacket with a grand flourish to reveal a hidden insignia, sewn into the lining of the coat with bright orange thread.

“I know because I _am_ one!” he declared proudly. “Ha ha! Yes! Your eyes do not deceive you! Hondo Ohnaka, dashing rogue and rebel traitor to the Empire!”

Ahsoka was taken aback. Not because she doubted Hondo’s ability to betray the current power base or cause problems for people on purpose, but only because she couldn’t figure why he’d put his neck on the line for something that wasn’t profitable. In her experience, guerilla armies were short on credits and tended to operate exclusively through volunteer labor, and she’d never seen Hondo volunteer to do anything for free.

“What’s your angle in all this?” she asked. “There’s always an angle with you.”

“A man can’t do something out of the pure goodness of his heart?”

“A man that isn’t you, Hondo? Absolutely.”

Hondo laughed uproariously at that, then wagged a finger in Ahsoka’s direction.

“You are very funny, you know that? And here I was, thinking Kenobi was the only Jedi with a sense of humor.” He said Obi-Wan’s name the same way he always had, pronouncing each syllable like it was its own independent word. _Ke-No-Bi._ Hondo laughed again, much more quietly, and turned his glass around in his hand with a smile that got emptier and emptier. Whatever jovial mask he’d been wearing thus far was starting to slip and the more he drank the more Ahsoka saw of what was hiding underneath.

“I know you are the one asking questions here, but I wanted to know… have you heard anything? About him? About Kenobi? I thought perhaps, if he were alive, he might have made it into the bounty hunter registry, but I lost access after Florrum was taken by the Empire.”

Ahsoka schooled her face into a lie before her tongue could invent one. Ever since learning Obi-Wan was alive--or at least, assumed alive--she’d known that, sooner or later, she would have to eschew the truth about him. She hadn’t known the one she’d be hiding it from would be Hondo Ohnaka, of all people. This was a conversation she’d predicted having with Maul, someone who hated Obi-Wan and had dedicated his life to causing as much pain as possible, with terrifying preternatural focus.

Maul was impossible to lie to; his powers of insight were too advanced to work around without dedicated, consistent mental gymnastics. It would be difficult to do for that reason, and one other: it would be for Obi-Wan’s sake, something that, if Maul knew, he might not even now forgive her for. 

She didn’t want to have to lie, to Maul _or_ Hondo for that matter. But she had to and she would, for all their sakes. To protect Obi-Wan from his worst enemy, to protect Maul from his self-destructive rage, and to protect herself from the fallout of what might occur should any of them learn the truth.

Hondo Ahsoka lied to for much the same reason, and was surprised that of all the things she’d done to him thus far, it was the only thing she felt guilty for.

Regardless of Obi-Wan’s own perception of their relationship, Hondo considered Kenobi his friend. In the Force Ahsoka could feel his pain, a small but very real fissure in him left unchecked by the Jedi’s absence. He was full of fissures actually, thousands of tiny little cracks unfilled, and Ahsoka thought back to the mountains of empty liquor bottles in his ship.

 _So that’s his angle,_ she thought. _That’s why you’re helping the Rebellion. You’re a broken man, trying to figure out how to rebuild, and you needed a foundation._

Just like she was. Just like she had been--curled up at the bottom of an empty glass and begging for someone to give her enough of something to drown in.

“No,” Ahsoka lied through her teeth, with the gentlest voice she could muster, as if that alone softened the blow. “The last I saw he was assumed dead. He went missing after the mission on Utapau at the war’s end, right when the Purge was set into motion. As I was no longer a part of the Order by then, I wasn’t told anything. I’m… sorry.”

She kept her gaze steady, her eyes apologetic. Were he anyone else, she might have reached across the table to reassure him; instead she poured into the facade her very real feelings of grief and all the famously unattached compassion the Jedi were known for.

Hondo inhaled sharply, and nodded. Ahsoka saw him blinking rapidly behind his goggles and watched him refill his glass, raise it in a toast, and down it all in one go.

“Ah, such is life,” he said after wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “I had been so hoping. When I realized Kenobi’s homicidal friend was here, I thought maybe he might know something. Even if it was to tell me he had killed Kenobi himself. I suppose I will delay getting closure and pretend there is a chance he is still alive out there, somewhere. Kenobi was… not an easy man to kill.” Hondo refilled his glass again slowly, looking resigned. “What is your next question?”

Ahsoka checked the chronometer next to her commlink--she was running out of time. 

“I just have one more,” she told him. 

It was a question born from the visions rending her dreams apart, the nightmares too real to be ignored. A question Maul had seen at the forefront of her mind, exposed without a shield to obscure it. He’d seen it and understood implicitly, enough to abandon sense and decorum and agree to leave his back yet again unguarded so Ahsoka could go off and chase a ghost from her past.

“You mentioned the liberation of the Core and Mid Rim systems. The Empire is a totalitarian regime, eating up the galaxy as fast as it can with its armies to assimilate all the planets into the Emperor’s little stratosphere of control. But based on what Maul has told me, Palpatine doesn’t go out further than Coruscant if he can help it, and when he does he’s closely guarded.”

Hondo took a sip of spotchka, expression growing wary. “Yes, yes, this is all true. You are not thinking of, you know--” Hondo drew his finger across his throat jerkily, “--are you? Because if you are, no offense, I am _not_ getting involved. I am a smuggler in the rebellion, _not_ an assassin.”

Ahsoka shook her head impatiently, brushing off anything else Hondo was about to say.

“No, no, I’m not after that, Maul and I decided it was suicide years ago. No, what I want to know is, if Palpatine stays locked up safe in his bases, who did he put in charge of leading the armies? Helming the sieges? Who conquers all his planets for him? It’s _always_ been his game to disguise his actions behind a puppet he can control, a better face he can show to the public to win their compliance.” 

The public newsreels on the ‘net made plenty of mention of “brave Imperial troopers” leading the cause for peace in the galaxy, showed endless hours of “prosperity campaigns” as they liked to call them, and continued to slander and demonize the remnants of the Jedi, reminding citizens to report any suspicious activity to their nearest local Imperial authority station.

Doctored footage and precise propaganda, with holes in the narrative so wide Ahsoka could fly a starfreighter through them. 

_A military that big, and the general is conspicuously missing from every advert, every recruitment commercial? Dictators_ **_love_ ** _to show off their powerful pawns, it’s a call to glory as much as it’s intimidation. So why? Why nothing? What is Palpatine hiding?_

“Ohhh,” Hondo said, low and troubled, realization dawning on his face. Fear, real honest fear lingered in the hush of his words. It was not a sound Ahsoka ever thought she’d hear from him. “Ohhh, yes. There is one such man. In the Alliance, he is… well known.”

Ahsoka’s knuckles were white with the force of her hold on her own arms. A cold darkness settled in the pit of her stomach; dread brought beads of sweat to her brow and stole the wet from her tongue.

“Who?” she asked. “Who is he?”

_What do you want with Anakin Skywalker?_

_He is the key, to everything._

“A faceless man,” Hondo said, his drink temporarily forgotten. “He wears a helmet, all smooth black plastoid unlike anything else I know, and sounds like a machine. Some think he must be some kind of droid, the way he moves and talks. I myself agreed, until, during an assault on one of the earliest safehouses, someone managed to escape with their life, and… this.”

He reached into his coat and pulled out a small datapad showing signs of heavy wear and tear, queued something up with a few imprecise jabs of his finger, and pushed it across the table. Ahsoka bent forward and watched on the shattered screen as a figure, cloaked in attire not so different from her own, systematically mowed his way through a squadron of rebel fighters with his bare hands.

But he wasn’t fighting them; it wasn’t his hands that did the damage. Horror turned Ahsoka’s insides into knots as the man in the footage turned the men and women of the rebellion into broken, mangled cadavers, snapping their necks from ten feet away two at a time, sometimes more, and throwing them against the decking and walls of their ship hard enough for the sound to carry.

“The Force,” Ahsoka whispered. Air had deserted her lungs. 

"Droids cannot use the Force," Hondo cemented grimly.

_To bring balance to the Force?_

_To… destroy it._

The footage grew shakier as whoever was filming fled. Their heavy, terrified breathing dominated all other noise, until a particularly visceral scream made the fleeing rebel stop and pedal back around.

And there, illuminated by brilliant, blood-red light, the figure stood below another rebel soldier he held aloft, impaled, a lightsaber driven straight through their heart. A lightsaber that, even from a distance, even in an entirely new color and all but obscured in the grip of this mechanized monster, Ahsoka recognized. One she would never forget.

How could she?

She’d looked at Anakin’s lightsaber nearly every day for years.

_He has long been groomed for his role, as my Master’s new_ **_apprentice_** _._

The world fell out from underneath her, and it was there that the footage ended. Hondo drew the datapad back to him and hid it away, and Ahsoka hated that she wanted to thank him for doing so. If she’d looked at it any longer, she didn’t know what she would have done.

“His name is Vader,” the pirate said. “Darth Vader. The Empire’s enforcer. If you seek the one responsible for putting his boot heel to the neck of every innocent system in the galaxy, look no further than him.”

The last remaining dregs of the spotchka went into Hondo’s glass, and he drank it back. It was impossible he wasn’t inebriated, yet he was as unaffected as ever. It didn't matter now.

“Darth Vader,” Ahsoka repeated. “A Sith Lord. Sidious’ apprentice.” Her numbness amazed her--she didn’t think her voice had ever been flatter, more monotone, than it was right then.

_Maul was telling the truth. From the very start he told me the truth. He gave me what I asked for and I threw it back in his face, and I didn’t believe him._

She couldn’t, not then. Back then taking anything Maul said at face value was the wisdom of a fool; in retrospect true foolishness was calling his vision flawed, because Maul had been right.

Of course Maul had been right. Maul spoke the truth because he spoke from _experience_ . When he said they were both tools he’d meant it--he had _lived_ it. When Obi-Wan defeated him on Naboo Maul was replaced by another apprentice already waiting in the wings, and when Dooku was killed it was by Anakin’s hand, precisely as intended.

Maul said he’d been long groomed for his role. How long? Wondering when it started and knowing it had gone on possibly all the time Anakin was her Master made Ahsoka sick.

 _That… that thing, in the vid. That monster is Anakin?_ _Oh, Master, what have they_ ** _done_** _to you?_

She let go of her arms, raised a trembling hand to her face to cover her mouth, and fought the roiling in her stomach. Maul had known. Maul had _known._

Wait.

Maul had known.

Ahsoka dropped her hand, only to ball it into a fist.

Yes, Maul had known. The way he’d looked at her when he read her intentions was proof: whether he knew Anakin was still alive was debatable, but what was irrefutable was the knowledge he had of Sidious’ methodology. No one would know better what had befallen Anakin than Maul, and no one else capable of telling her.

Ahsoka had new pressing questions begging for answers, and she wouldn’t get them from Hondo.

The chronometer flashed the changing of the hour.

Time was up.

“You need to leave,” Ahsoka said, banishing the bile at the back of her throat as she stood. “Get off planet, as soon as you can.”

“You are not going to kill me?” Hondo asked, looking genuinely surprised.

“Your information was good. Better than the booze I paid you with, judging from the look of you. Consider this your real payment, and leave Morix before I change my mind or Maul makes up his.”

Not one to look a gift bantha in the mouth, Hondo collected himself and stumbled out of the booth, stopping dead a second later.

“My word has never been very good, but you have it when I say I will not speak of what I have seen here. Time amongst the Alliance has taught me the true value of good information, and it is that some lives should not be sold out for it, no matter _how_ good.”

“So you say. Don’t make me regret this, Ohnaka.”

“I would not dream of it,” he grinned, his persona slipping comfortably back into place. “But! Before I go, there was one more thing I thought you ought to know.” Hondo dove his hand into his pockets, searching fruitlessly for a moment until he produced a white chit card, emblazoned with the same symbol from the lining of his coat.

“If you should ever grow weary of organized crime and want to try something _less_ organized, the rebellion could use someone like you. These are trying times, and the galaxy has found itself in short supply of heroes. If I recall correctly, the Jedi could be relied upon for a bit of heroism, now and again.”

He placed the chit down on the table, and Ahsoka saw Obi-Wan’s face pass by in the shadow of Hondo’s thoughts.

“Now and again,” Ahsoka replied quietly. “But I’m--”

“Not a Jedi, of course, of course, I remember. There are no Jedi anymore, as you said.” They went to the door together where Ahsoka slid the keypass home, and the lock disengaged with a harsh pneumatic hiss.

Hondo gave Ahsoka one long final look, like he was committing her to memory in case this was the last he saw of her, too.

“I do not understand why you have chosen to ally with our horned friend,” he told her. “I cannot fathom it, I really cannot. But I make a point to stay out of business that is not beneficial, and far be it from me to judge anyone. Still, my offer stands.”

Hondo gestured to the chit.

“You will know where to find me. Farewell, woman who is not Ahsoka Tano.”

Ahsoka watched him go, tracking his departure until he was around the corner and out of sight, and only then did she move. The weight of all she’d learned and the subsequent revelations weighed on her like a neutron star and if she stood still any longer she’d be crushed.

_Maul._

No doubt he was expecting to hear from her with the allotted hour up. Ahsoka didn’t want him coming to her, so she set herself into motion with savage purpose. The chit was scooped from the table and thrust into her robes at the same time that she hit the record button on her comm.

[ _I’m on my way back. Be there in ten._ ]

The message sent as she was hanging the keypass on a hook outside the door, and a beep of affirmation that it was received sounded a minute later when Ahsoka took the alternate route to the bar’s backdoor--Hondo would certainly be at the counter talking to Lyn, and the Togruta was out of time to entertain either of them any further.

What she did have time for was popping into the storeroom to heft an entire case of Corellian wine bottles onto her shoulder, something which she’d pay for in full later after she apologized to Lyn for boosting it, assuming she remembered anything from tonight after what she was about to do.

A horrible storm of untold proportions was building, one long in coming, and Ahsoka’s control on its reins were rapidly slipping. This wasn’t something she could solve with the clarity she’d been chasing in blood and blows for ten months, it never was. All she’d done, all she’d ever been able to do, was fight it down and bind it up, with chains made of sleepless nights and fierce refusal to give in to the only coping mechanism she hadn’t tried--not because she actually thought she’d be weaker for giving in to it, but because she feared beginning would open the door to it never ending.

_No tears. I couldn’t._

To weep would be to take a step back, and experience had shown her again and again that the only way was forward.

 _But,_ she thought on the return trip, _what is there ahead of me left to hold on to them for?_

Her master, her friend, her _brother_ ; someone had taken him from her and twisted him into an abomination. Selfish as it was, Anakin was who she had missed most. Ahsoka had grieved deeper for him than all the rest of the Order combined, felt his death like a shard of glass in her heart that cut her every time it beat, and she’d left it there because barring her remaining saber her pain at the loss of him was all she had left, and that small agony had almost become a _comfort_ because it came from _him._

All her sentimental masochism, and for what? Not only was Anakin alive, he was a dark lord of the Sith, the only actual traitor amongst the Jedi, and he’d sold them _all_ out like lambs to the slaughter, and worst of all was knowing that not a single one of them meant enough to him to stay his hand in their extermination.

Not even her.

_How can this be real? How could he do this to us?_

_To me...?_

Ahsoka felt only inches from the edge of what she could take. Hadn’t she been his padawan? Hadn’t he loved her, and she him? Was it because she left? Was that it? Just the notion that her choice to leave the Jedi could have contributed to Anakin’s fall was enough to push her closer than ever to her breaking point.

Master Plo Koon was gone. Obi-Wan was out of reach. Bariss was dead.

And Anakin… Anakin was something so impossibly worse.

Ahsoka had no one left--no one save casual acquaintances and lovers made in the service of vice, and the man paying them who was much a monster as Anakin had become.

Except that he was here, and monster though he may be, Maul had never betrayed her, nor once turned his back on her. 

He was all she had left.

The only one left to hold onto.

And she was tired of pretending she didn’t want him there to hold.

_Maul. I’m sorry for what I’m going to ask of you, but if I’m going to break myself with this, I have to know. I have to know what Sidious did to Anakin to make him into something so inhuman._

_I have to know what Sidious did to you._

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some fun little facts: Lyn's Jawa keychains were my favorite tiny detail to ever be included in something I've written, and the Gella twins are in fact canon characters! They had (from what I could find) just one appearance in The Phantom Menace as the Twi girls tending to Sebulba before the pod race, apparently they were his slaves. I also couldn't find any info on their age, so for the sake of putting them in the ballpark of the now 20 y/o Ahsoka (her age in my story) I headcanon them as being 16 during the prequels.
> 
> Originally I was just going to make some more fanon OCs for the scene of Ahsoka getting loved on by some cute twins, but WOULDN'T YOU KNOW IT Star Wars had me covered for once.


End file.
